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Jel Classification:E65 

Working Paper
Financial Vulnerabilities, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and Monetary Policy

We define a measure to be a financial vulnerability if, in a VAR framework that allows for nonlinearities, an impulse to the measure leads to an economic contraction. We evaluate alternative macrofinancial imbalances as vulnerabilities: nonfinancial sector credit, risk appetite of financial market participants, and the leverage and short-term funding of financial firms. We find that nonfinancial credit is a vulnerability: impulses to the credit-to-GDP gap when it is high leads to a recession. Risk appetite leads to an economic expansion in the near-term, but also higher credit and a recession ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2016-055

Working Paper
Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as micro data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity ...
Working Papers , Paper 1810

Journal Article
So, Why Didn’t the 2009 Recovery Act Improve the Nation’s Highways and Bridges?

Although the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act) provided nearly $28 billion to state governments for improving U.S. highways, the highway system saw no significant improvement. For example, relative to the years before the act, the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges was nearly unchanged, the number of workers on highway and bridge construction did not significantly increase, and the annual value of construction put in place for public highways barely budged. The author shows that as states spent Recovery Act highway grants, many ...
Review , Volume 99 , Issue 2 , Pages 169-182

Working Paper
Preventive vs. Curative Medicine: A Macroeconomic Analysis of Health Care over the Life Cycle

This paper studies differences in health care usage and health outcomes between low- and high-income individuals. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) I find that early in life the rich spend significantly more on health care, whereas from middle to very old age medical spending of the poor surpasses that of the rich by 25%. In addition, low-income individuals are less likely to incur any medical expenditures in a given year, yet, when they do, their expenses are more likely to be extreme. To account for these facts, I develop and estimate a life-cycle model of two ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-025

Working Paper
The Consequences of Bretton Woods’ International Capital Controls and the High Value of Geopolitical Stability

This paper quantifies the positive and normative effects of international capital controls on global and regional economic activity under The Bretton Woods international financial system and thereafter. A three region, open economy, DSGE capital flows accounting framework consisting of the U.S., Western Europe, and the Rest of the World, is developed to identify capital controls and quantify their impact. We find these controls had large positive and normative effects by restricting international capital flows. Counterfactual analyses show world output would have been 0.6% higher had there ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-042

Journal Article
Making sense of dissents: a history of FOMC dissents

This article presents a record of dissents on Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) monetary policy votes from the Committee?s inception in its modern form in 1936 through 2013. Dissents were rare during the Committee?s first 20 years but began to increase in the late 1950s. The number of dissents increased sharply during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when both inflation and unemployment were unusually high. However, at other times, the number of dissents was not correlated with either inflation or the unemployment rate. A review of FOMC records and published statements indicates that ...
Review , Volume 96 , Issue 3 , Pages 213-227

Working Paper
Tempting FAIT: Flexible Average Inflation Targeting and the Post-COVID U.S. Inflation Surge

In August 2020, the Federal Reserve replaced Flexible Inflation Targeting (FIT) with Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (FAIT), introducing make-up strategies that allow inflation to temporarily exceed the 2% target. Using a synthetic control approach, we estimate that FAIT raised CPI inflation by about 1 percentage point and core CPI inflation by 0.5 percentage points, suggesting a moderate impact net of food and energy and a largely temporary effect. Short- to medium-term inflation expectations increased by approximately 0.8 percentage points, while long-term expectations remained ...
Working Papers , Paper 2511

Working Paper
The Household Expenditure Response to a Consumption Tax Rate Increase

This study measures the effect of an increase in Japan's Value Added Tax rate on the timing of household expenditures and consumption, which do not necessarily coincide. The analysis finds that durable and storable expenditures surged in the month prior to the tax rate increase, fell sharply upon implementation, but quickly returned to their previous long-run levels. Non-storable non-durable expenditures increased slightly in the month prior to the tax rate increase, but were otherwise unresponsive. A dynamic structural model of household consumption reveals that the observed expenditure ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-035

Working Paper
An Early Experiment with \"Permazero\"

We investigate a monetary regime with persistent, near-zero policy interest rates ("permazero" in the terminology of Bullard 2015). This regime was implemented in 1683 by a prominent early central bank called the Bank of Amsterdam ("Bank"). The Bank fixed its policy rate at one-half percent and held it unchanged for more than a century. Maintaining the rate helped stabilize the value of Bank money. We employ archival data to reconstruct the Bank's activities during a portion of that interval (1736?91) for which data are most readily available. The data suggest that "permazero" worked ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2017-5

Journal Article
Three Challenges to Central Bank Orthodoxy

Since 2007-09, the Federal Reserve has pursued a very aggressive monetary policy strategy. This strategy has been associated with healthy labor market conditions, moderate economic growth, and inflation?netting out the effects of a major oil price shock?that is close to the Federal Open Market Committee?s (FOMC?s) 2 percent target. Thus, with the economy returning to normal, it is natural for the FOMC to begin the process of exiting its highly accommodative policy. The FOMC has laid out several well-defined steps for this process. This strategy may be called central bank orthodoxy, since it ...
Review , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , Pages 1-16

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