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Discussion Paper
Forecasting with the FRBNY DSGE Model
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) has built a DSGE model as part of its efforts to forecast the U.S. economy. On Liberty Street Economics, we are publishing a weeklong series to provide some background on the model and its use for policy analysis and forecasting, as well as its forecasting performance. In this post, we briefly discuss what DSGE models are, explain their usefulness as a forecasting tool, and preview the forthcoming pieces in this series.
Discussion Paper
A New Perspective on Low Interest Rates
Interest rates in the United States have remained at historically low levels for many years. This series of posts explores the forces behind the persistence of low rates. We briefly discuss some of the explanations advanced in the academic literature, and propose an alternative hypothesis that centers on the premium associated with safe and liquid assets. Our argument, outlined in a paper we presented at the Brookings Conference on Economic Activity last March, suggests that the increase in this premium since the late 1990s has been a key driver of the decline in the real return on U.S. ...
Discussion Paper
Global Trends in Interest Rates
Long-term government bond yields are at their lowest levels of the past 150 years in advanced economies. In this blog post, we argue that this low-interest-rate environment reflects secular global forces that have lowered real interest rates by about two percentage points over the past forty years. The magnitude of this decline has been nearly the same in all advanced economies, since their real interest rates have converged over this period. The key factors behind this development are an increase in demand for safety and liquidity among investors and a slowdown in global economic growth.
Report
Financial Intermediary Balance Sheet Management
We consider a simple variant of the standard real business cycle model in which shareholders hire a self-interested executive to manage the firm on their behalf. A generic family of compensation contracts similar to those employed in practice is studied. When compensation is convex in the firm?s own dividend (or share price), a given increase in the firm?s output generated by an additional unit of physical investment results in a more than proportional increase in the manager?s income. Incentive contracts of sufficient yet modest convexity are shown to result in an indeterminate general ...
Report
Dynamic effects of credit shocks in a data-rich environment
We examine the dynamic effects of credit shocks using a large data set of U.S. economic and financial indicators in a structural factor model. An identified credit shock resulting in an unanticipated increase in credit spreads causes a large and persistent downturn in indicators of real economic activity, labor market conditions, expectations of future economic conditions, a gradual decline in aggregate price indices, and a decrease in short- and longer-term riskless interest rates. Our identification procedure, which imposes restrictions on the response of a small number of economic ...
Report
The inflation-output trade-off revisited
A rich literature from the 1970s shows that as inflation expectations become more and more ingrained, monetary policy loses its stimulative effect. In the extreme, with perfectly anticipated inflation, there is no trade-off between inflation and output. A recent literature on the interest-rate zero lower bound, however, suggests there may be some benefits from anticipated inflation when he economy is in a liquidity trap. In this paper, we reconcile these two views by showing that while it is true, at positive interest rates, that inflation loses its stimulative effects as it becomes better ...
Discussion Paper
A DSGE Perspective on Safety, Liquidity, and Low Interest Rates
The preceding two posts in this series documented that interest rates on safe and liquid assets, such as U.S. Treasury securities, have declined significantly in the past twenty years. Of course, short-term interest rates in the United States are under the control of the Federal Reserve, at least in nominal terms. So it is legitimate to ask, To what extent is this decline driven by the Federal Reserve?s interest rate policy? This post addresses this question by coupling the results presented in the previous post with those obtained from an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium ...
Discussion Paper
The Federal Reserve’s Review of Its Monetary Policy Framework: A Roadmap
In early 2019, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC or the Committee) launched a comprehensive review of its monetary policy framework (MPF)—the strategies, tools, and communication practices employed by the Federal Reserve to achieve its congressionally mandated goals of maximum employment and price stability.
Discussion Paper
The FRBNY DSGE Model Meets Julia
We have implemented the FRBNY DSGE model in a free and open-source language called Julia. The code is posted here on GitHub, a public repository hosting service. This effort is the result of a collaboration between New York Fed staff and folks from the QuantEcon project, whose aim is to coordinate development of high performance open-source code for quantitative economic modeling.
Journal Article
Assessing changes in the monetary transmission mechanism: a VAR approach
Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary Transmission