Search Results
Working Paper
Taylor Rule Estimation by OLS
Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation of monetary policy rules produces potentially inconsistent estimates of policy parameters. The reason is that central banks react to variables, such as inflation and the output gap, that are endogenous to monetary policy shocks. Endogeneity implies a correlation between regressors and the error term – hence, an asymptotic bias. In principle, Instrumental Variables (IV) estimation can solve this endogeneity problem. In practice, however, IV estimation poses challenges, as the validity of potential instruments depends on various unobserved features of ...
Journal Article
The Greek crisis: Argentina revisited?
Greece?s enormous fiscal deficit and high debt level culminated earlier this year in the euro zone?s first sovereign debt crisis. High yields on Greece?s debt indicate that markets have priced in the possibility of default. Compared with Argentina, which defaulted on its debt in 2001, Greece?s fiscal position is much worse. However, unlike Argentina, Greece is supported by other euro zone countries and is not vulnerable to speculative currency attacks, advantages that offer it some protection from default.
Working Paper
Aggregation and the PPP puzzle in a sticky-price model
We study the purchasing power parity (PPP) puzzle in a multi-sector, two-country, sticky- price model. Across sectors, firms differ in the extent of price stickiness, in accordance with recent microeconomic evidence on price setting in various countries. Combined with local currency pricing, this leads sectoral real exchange rates to have heterogeneous dynamics. We show analytically that in this economy, deviations of the real exchange rate from PPP are more volatile and persistent than in a counterfactual one-sector world economy that features the same average frequency of price changes, and ...
Report
China in the global economy. SF Fed President John Williams talks with Zheng Liu, Mark Spiegel, and Fernanda Nechio of the international research team about China's economic slowdown and how it's affecting global economic activity
In the 2015 annual report, What We've Learned...and why it matters, we share our research findings about the slowdown in China's economic growth and its effects on the U.S. economy, emerging market economies, and global commodity markets. Cyclical and structural factors underlie the slowdown. We discuss the impact of trends in exports and investment, and the country's transformation from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. We believe China's days of 10 percent economic growth likely are over.
Journal Article
Mixed signals: labor markets and monetary policy
Since the Great Recession, standard ways of measuring the labor market have given mixed signals about the strength of the U.S. recovery. This has increased the uncertainty around how to interpret job market conditions, which has made calibrating monetary policy to achieve full employment more challenging. Ultimately, policymakers need to make judgments about how much these conflicting indicators reflect cyclical weakness in the job market versus structural factors that would be less easily remedied with monetary policy.
Working Paper
Industrial Composition of Syndicated Loans and Banks’ Climate Commitments
In the past two decades, a number of banks joined global initiatives aimed to mitigate climate change by “greening” their asset portfolios. We study whether banks that made such commitments have a different emission exposure of their portfolios of syndicated loans than banks that did not. We rely on loan-level information with global coverage combined with country-industry information on emissions. We find that all banks have reduced their loan-emission exposures over the last 8 years. However, we do not find differences between banks that did and those that did not signal their ...
Working Paper
Do people undestand monetary policy?
We combine questions from the Michigan Survey about the future path of prices, interest rates, and unemployment to investigate whether U.S. households are aware of the so-called Taylor (1993) rule. For comparison, we perform the same analysis using questions from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our findings support the view that some households form their expectations about the future path of interest rates, inflation, and unemployment in a way that is consistent with Taylor-type rules. The extent to which this happens, however, does not appear to be uniform across income and ...
Working Paper
Real exchange rate dynamics in sticky-price models with capital
The standard argument for abstracting from capital accumulation in sticky-price macro models is based on their short-run focus: over this horizon, capital does not move much. This argument is more problematic in the context of real exchange rate (RER) dynamics, which are very persistent. In this paper we study RER dynamics in sticky-price models with capital accumulation. We analyze both a model with an economy-wide rental market for homogeneous capital, and an economy in which capital is sector specific. We find that, in response to monetary shocks, capital increases the persistence and ...
Journal Article
How Important Is Information from FOMC Minutes?
To foster transparency and accountability in monetary policy, the Federal Open Market Committee publishes a statement immediately following every FOMC meeting, followed by the full minutes of the meeting three weeks later. Evidence suggests the release of the minutes can have a sizable impact on Treasury bond yields. The impacts are largest when the tone of the minutes differs from the tone of the statement. This presumably leads markets to change their expectations of future monetary policy.
Working Paper
Demographics and Real Interest Rates Across Countries and Over Time
We explore the implications of demographic trends for the evolution of real interest rates across countries and over time. To that end, we develop a tractable three-country general equilibrium model with imperfect capital mobility and country-specific demographic trends. We calibrate the model to study how low-frequency movements in a country's real interest rate depend on its own and other countries' demographic factors, given a certain degree of financial integration. The more financially integrated a country is, the higher the sensitivity of its real interest rate to global developments ...