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Working Paper
Exchange rates in the long run
If Purchasing Power Parity holds in the long run, then real exchange rates are mean stationary. To test this hypothesis, monthly data on bilateral real exchange rates between the United States and five countries extending back to the 1920s are calculated. The null hypothesis of mean stationarity is tested against a variety of nonstationary alternatives. Our results strongly favor mean stationarity over models that permit long-run trends in real exchange rates. The data also favor stationarity over a unit root process with no drift. We show that the realized path of the real exchange rate lies ...
Journal Article
Financial stress: what is it, how can it be measured, and why does it matter?
The U.S. economy is currently experiencing a period of significant financial stress. This stress has contributed to the downturn in the economy by boosting the cost of credit and making businesses, households, and financial institutions highly cautious. To alleviate the financial stress and counteract its effects on the economy, the Federal Reserve has reduced the federal funds rate target substantially and undertaken unprecedented actions to support the functioning of financial markets. There will come a point, however, when the Federal Reserve needs to remove liquidity from the economy and ...
Journal Article
Economic policy for the information economy : a summary of the Bank's 2001 Economic Symposium
The economies of the industrialized countries are being reshaped by the rapid development and diffusion of advanced information and communications technologies. Access to information is unprecedented, and the ability to process and exchange information has helped businesses increase efficiency and households raise their standards of living. There has been considerable agreement as to the broad features of the emerging information economy. But there has been less consensus on the likely magnitude and significance of the economic effects or on the important policy issues raised by these ...
Journal Article
Are longer-term inflation expectations stable?
Bundick and Hakkio use survey data to evaluate the stability of forecasters' long-term inflation expectations.
Working Paper
Inflation targeting and private sector forecasts
Transparency is one of the biggest innovations in central bank policy of the past quarter century. Modern central bankers believe that they should be as clear about their objectives and actions as possible. However, is greater transparency always beneficial? Recent work suggests that when private agents have diverse sources of information, public information can cause them to overreact to the signals from the central bank, leading the economy to be too sensitive to common forecast errors. Greater transparency could be destabilizing. While this theoretical result has clear intuitive appeal, it ...
Journal Article
Bond Premiums and the Natural Real Rate of Interest
Journal Article
Implications of recent U.S. energy trends for trade forecasts
The development of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling has brought significant structural change to the energy sector, increasing energy production and decreasing net energy imports. Future changes in energy policy or technology could have even larger effects on energy exports and thus overall exports. As a result, distinguishing energy from non-energy components of trade becomes important for forecasts in both the near and longer term. Craig S. Hakkio and Jun Nie introduce models separating energy from the non-energy components of trade to examine how changes in energy production ...
Working Paper
The marginal income tax rate schedule from 1930 to 1990