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Journal Article
Understanding the Recent Rise in Municipal Bond Yields
In late March, investors sold off municipal bonds at a rapid pace, depressing municipal bond prices and driving up their yields relative to U.S. Treasuries. We find that this initial investor run on the municipal bond market was likely due to increased liquidity demand rather than credit concerns, making the Federal Reserve’s early actions to relieve liquidity stress effective. Going forward, however, municipal bond prices will likely reflect increased credit concerns.
Working Paper
Sovereign Risk and Fiscal Information: A Look at the U.S. State Default of the 1840s
This paper examines how newspaper reporting affects government bond prices during the U.S. state default of the 1840s. Using unsupervised machine learning algorithms, the paper first constructs novel ``fiscal information indices'' for state governments based on U.S. newspapers at the time. The impact of the indices on government bond prices varied over time. Before the crisis, the entry of new western states into the bond market spurred competition: more state-specific fiscal news imposed downward pressure on bond prices for established states in the market. During the crisis, more ...
Journal Article
Examining the Recent Shift in State and Local Pension Plans to Alternative Investments
State and local pension plans have increasingly turned to alternative investments in recent years. The authors found that this shift appears to be across the board; underfunding only partially explains this shift. In addition, they found that switching to alternative investments does not necessarily increase the volatility of returns.
Journal Article
Implementation Delays in Pension Retrenchment Reforms
As the global population ages, public spending on pensions has increased dramatically. As a result, policymakers have increasingly focused on pension retrenchment reforms to keep their systems solvent. These reforms usually involve long implementation delays to provide retirees time to adjust their retirement plans. However, long implementation delays also slow the rollback of governments? pension spending, potentially raising long-run fiscal risks. {{p}} {{p}} Huixin Bi, Kevin Hunt, and Sarah Zubairy collect a new data set that tracks implementation delays during pension retrenchment reforms ...
Journal Article
The Fiscal Stance of U.S. States
We study the fiscal stance of U.S. states through the lens of state reserve funds. We find that the overall rainy day and unemployment insurance funds have largely recovered since the start of the Great Recession but at an uneven pace across states. More importantly, we find that states are better prepared to meet their own budgetary shortfalls in the event of a downturn than the shortfalls of households.
Journal Article
Federal Government Outlays Remain Historically Elevated, Spurred by Robust Transfers
Over the past six decades, the federal government has shifted a larger share of its outlays toward transfer payments to individuals and state and local governments. These longer-run trends were exacerbated during the pandemic, leading to higher deficits for the federal government and an increasingly high share of federal outlays supporting the economy through consumer spending.
Journal Article
Fiscal Relief during the COVID-19 Pandemic
In response to the sharp economic downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed unprecedented policy relief measures to support households, businesses, and the broader economy. Compared with previous fiscal stimulus responses, these relief programs have been unmatched in size and scope, speed of response, and novelty of design.Huixin Bi and Chaitri Gulati review recent empirical research on three fiscal relief programs—stimulus checks, augmented unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)—to understand their effects on the broader economy as ...
Journal Article
A Slowdown in Job Vacancies Is Likely to Coincide with Higher Unemployment and Slower Wage Growth
Recently, some market observers have proposed that job vacancies could decline, and ease wage growth, without a commensurate increase in the unemployment rate. However, we find that the typical relationship of declining job vacancies and higher unemployment holds even at exceptionally low levels of the unemployment rate. A notable decline in job postings will likely coincide with an easing of tightness in the labor market, a higher unemployment rate, and slowing wage growth.
Working Paper
Debt-dependent effects of fiscal expansions
Economists often postulate that fiscal expansions are less stimulative when government debt is high than when it is low. Empirical evidence, however, is ambiguous. Using a nonlinear neoclassical growth model, we show that the difference in government spending effects between high- and low-debt environments depends on the wealth effect on labor supply and on whether the government uses taxes or spending to retire debt. Because of interrelated state variables, structural VAR estimations conditioning on debt alone can fail to isolate debt-dependent effects. Also, uncertainty on when the ...
Journal Article
Understanding State and Local Government Spending over the Business Cycle
State and local (S&L) government spending is essential for providing public services and infrastructure and accounts for more than 10 percent of GDP. How this sector responds during a recession can play an important role in shaping the overall economic recovery.Huixin Bi, Chaitri Gulati, and Nora Traum document how S&L government expenditures have evolved over the business cycle since the 1950s. They find that from 1950 to the mid-1980s, S&L spending followed no uniform pattern after recessions: spending was sometimes procyclical (declining during recessions) and sometimes countercyclical ...