Search Results
Working Paper
How Persistent Are Unconventional Monetary Policy Effects?
The weight of the evidence indicates that unconventional monetary policy (UMP) shocks had persistent effects on yields. To make this point, this paper illustrates that the most influential SVAR model of UMP effects, which implies transient effects, exhibits structural instability, sensitivity to specification and single observations that render the conclusions unreliable. Restricted SVAR models that limit asset return predictability are more stable and imply that UMP shocks were persistent. This conclusion is consistent with evidence from micro studies, surveys of professional forecasters, ...
Working Paper
Assessing the Evidence on Neighborhood Effects from Moving to Opportunity
The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment randomly assigned housing vouchers that could be used in low-poverty neighborhoods. Consistent with the literature, I find that receiving an MTO voucher had no effect on outcomes like earnings, employment, and test scores. However, after studying the assumptions identifying neighborhood effects with MTO data, this paper reaches a very different interpretation of these results than found in the literature. I first specify a model in which the absence of effects from the MTO program implies an absence of neighborhood effects. I present theory and ...
Working Paper
From Organization to Activity in the US Collateralized Interbank Market
This paper studies and connects market organization and activity in the US collateralized interbank market using an assumption-neutral approach. We apply cluster analysis to aggregate activity factors suggested by prior studies to support two market organizations: three-tier and core-periphery. We find that four bank-specific factors and one economic conditions factor explain interbank activity for both alternative organizations. We also find evidence that the interbank market organization affects institutions? borrowing and lending. While both organizations moderate interbank activity, the ...
Working Paper
Can We Take the “Stress” Out of Stress Testing? Applications of Generalized Structural Equation Modeling to Consumer Finance
Financial firms, and banks in particular, rely heavily on complex suites of interrelated statistical models in their risk management and business reporting infrastructures. Statistical model infrastructures are often developed using a piecemeal approach to model building, in which different components are developed and validated separately. This type of modeling framework has significant limitations at each stage of the model management life cycle, from development and documentation to validation, production, and redevelopment. We propose an empirical framework, spurred by recent developments ...
Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and the Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations
What drives aggregate fluctuations? I test the granular hypothesis, according to which the largest firms in the economy drive aggregate dynamics, by estimating a dynamic factor model with firm-level data and controlling for the propagation of firm-level shocks using multi-firm growth model. Each time series, the growth rate of sales of a specific firm, is decomposed in an unobserved common macroeconomic component and in a residual that I interpret as an idiosyncratic firm-level component. The empirical results suggest that, once I control for aggregate shocks, idiosyncratic shocks do not ...
Journal Article
FRED-QD: A Quarterly Database for Macroeconomic Research
In this article, we present and describe FRED-QD, a large, quarterly frequency macroeconomic database that is currently available and regularly updated at https://research.stlouisfed.org/econ/mccracken/fred-databases/. The data provided are closely modeled to that used in Stock and Watson (2012a). As in our previous work on FRED-MD (McCracken and Ng, 2016), which is at a monthly frequency, our goal is simply to provide a publicly available source of macroeconomic "big data" that is updated in real time using the FRED® data service. We show that factors extracted from the FRED-QD dataset ...
Working Paper
Measuring the Effects of Dollar Appreciation on Asia: A Favar Approach
Exchange rate shocks have mixed effects on economic activity in both theory and empirical VAR models. In this paper, we extend the empirical literature by considering the implications of a positive shock to the U.S. dollar in a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) model for the U.S. and three large Asian economies: Korea, Japan and China. The FAVAR framework allows us to represent a country?s aggregate economic activity by a latent factor, generated from a broad set of underlying observable economic indicators. To control for global conditions, we also include in the FAVAR a ?global ...
Working Paper
International Transmission of Japanese Monetary Shocks Under Low and Negative Interest Rates: A Global Favar Approach
We examine the implications of Japanese monetary shocks under recent very low and sometimes negative interest rates to the Japanese economy as well as three of its major trading partners: Korea, China and the United States. We follow the literature in using movements in 2-year Japanese government bond rates as proxies for changes in monetary conditions in the neighborhood of the zero lower bound. We examine the implications of shocks to the 2-year rate in a series of factor-augmented vector autoregressive?or FAVAR?models, in which both local and global conditions are proxied by latent factors ...
Report
Sparse Trend Estimation
The low-frequency movements of economic variables play a prominent role in policy analysis and decision-making. We develop a robust estimation approach for these slow-moving trend processes that is guided by a judicious choice of priors and characterized by sparsity. We present novel stylized facts from longer-run survey expectations that inform the structure of the estimation procedure. The general version of the proposed Bayesian estimator with a spike-and-slab prior accounts explicitly for cyclical dynamics. We show that it performs well in simulations against relevant benchmarks and ...
Working Paper
How Persistent Are Unconventional Monetary Policy Effects?
The weight of the evidence indicates that unconventional monetary policy (UMP) shocks had persistent effects on yields. To make this point, this paper illustrates that the most influential SVAR model of UMP effects, which implies transient effects, exhibits structural instability, sensitivity to specification and single observations that render the conclusions unreliable. Restricted SVAR models that limit asset return predictability are more stable and imply that UMP shocks were persistent. This conclusion is consistent with evidence from micro studies, surveys of professional forecasters, ...