Search Results
Working Paper
Interest Rate Surprises: A Tale of Two Shocks
Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of these two shocks, we use interest rate changes on days of macroeconomic data releases. On these release dates, there are no pure policy shocks, which allows us to identify the impact of information shocks and thereby distill pure policy shocks from interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements. Our ...
Working Paper
Not so fast: high-frequency financial data for macroeconomic event studies
Over the last decade, it has become increasingly popular to use event studies with intraday asset pricing data to study the effect of macroeconomic events on the economy. The proponents of this approach argue that asset prices react to macroeconomic events very quickly and that if we know the precise timing of a macroeconomic announcement, a very narrow event window around such an announcement (ranging from 30 minutes to 60 minutes) should be sufficiently long and free from contaminating information that might otherwise cause biased estimates in wider event windows. In contrast, this paper ...
Working Paper
Household Inflation Expectations and Consumer Spending: Evidence from Panel Data
Recent research offers mixed results concerning the relationship between inflation expectations and consumption, using qualitative measures of readiness to spend. We revisit this question using survey panel data of actual spending from the U.S. between 2009 and 2012 that also allows us to control for household heterogeneity. We find that durables spending increases with expected inflation only for selected types of households while nondurables spending does not respond to expected inflation. Moreover, spending decreases with expected unemployment. These results imply a limited stimulating ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy through production networks: evidence from the stock market
Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on stock prices during narrow time windows centered around press releases by the FOMC. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and a network effect. We attribute 50 to 85 percent of the overall impact to network effects. The decomposition is a robust feature of the data, and we confirm large network effects in realized cash-flow fundamentals. A simple model with intermediate inputs allows a structural interpretation of our empirical strategy. Our findings indicate that production ...
Life Insurers’ Preference for Familiar Bond Issuers Limits COVID-19 Shock Transmission
Despite regulations that encourage diversification and informational symmetry among buyers, insurance companies tend to lend to their current borrowers. This bondholder–issuer relationship moderates the effect of transitory economic shocks such as those associated with the onset of COVID-19.
Working Paper
Business complexity and risk management: evidence from operational risk events in U. S. bank holding companies
How does business complexity affect risk management in financial institutions? The commonly used risk measures rely on either balance-sheet or market-based information, both of which may suffer from identification problems when it comes to answering this question. Balance-sheet measures, such as return on assets, capture the risk when it is realized, while empirical identification requires knowledge of the risk when it is actually taken. Market-based measures, such as bond yields, not only ignore the problem that investors are not fully aware of all the risks taken by management due to ...
Working Paper
The Transmission of Monetary Policy through Bank Lending : The Floating Rate Channel
We describe and test a mechanism through which outstanding bank loans affect the firm balance sheet channel of monetary policy transmission. Unlike other debt, most bank loans have floating rates mechanically tied to monetary policy rates. Hence, monetary policy-induced changes to floating rates affect the liquidity, balance sheet strength, and investment of financially constrained firms that use bank debt. We show that firms---especially financially constrained firms---with more unhedged bank debt display stronger sensitivity of their stock price, cash holdings, sales, inventory, and fixed ...
Briefing
Cliff notes: the effects of the 2013 debt-ceiling crisis
We investigate the effects of the 2013 debt-ceiling crisis on the Treasury bill market and possible spillovers to the commercial paper market and money market funds. We also compare this experience with the prior debt-ceiling crisis in 2011. We find that the 2013 debt-ceiling crisis reduced the demand for Treasury bills that were scheduled to mature right after the debt-ceiling deadline, but not for longer-term Treasury bills. Accordingly, we see that a hump formed at the shorter end of the term structure of Treasury bill yields around the debt-ceiling deadline, with the term structure ...
Working Paper
Household inflation expectations and consumer spending: evidence from panel data
With nominal interest rates at the zero lower bound, an important question for monetary policy is whether, as predicted in prior theoretical work, an increase in inflation expectations would boost current consumer spending. Using survey panel data for the period from April 2009 to November 2012, we examine the relationship between a household's inflation expectations and its current spending, taking into account other factors such as the household's wage growth expectations, the uncertainty surrounding its inflation expectations, macroeconomic conditions, and unobserved heterogeneity at the ...
Using Inflation Expectations to Boost Consumer Spending Poses Policy Risks
Communication that raises inflation expectations has been suggested as a policy tool for central banks. Our research suggests that this policy tool has some limitations that central banks must manage when implementing it.