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Jel Classification:H12 

Discussion Paper
Impacts of COVID-19: Mitigation Efforts versus Herd Immunity

The rapid spread of COVID-19 is having devastating effects on the global economy. With death curves beginning to bend, governments will soon need to determine when and how to relax lockdown measures. The crucial question is: what are the public health consequences of reopening the economy? In this article, we argue that the observed decline in daily deaths could be due to two scenarios: social distancing measures and herd immunity. Both the widely used SIR model and the data collected thus far cannot distinguish these two scenarios. Such an identification problem generates a large degree of ...
Policy Hub , Paper 2020-3

Working Paper
Shadow Insurance? Money Market Fund Investors and Bank Sponsorship

We argue that bank holding companies (BHCs) extend shadow insurance to the prime institutional money market funds (PI-MMFs) they sponsor and that PI-MMFs price this shadow insurance by charging investors significantly higher expense ratios and paying lower net yields. We provide evidence that after September 2008, expense ratios at BHC-sponsored PI-MMFs increased more than at non-BHC-sponsored PI-MMFs. Despite higher expense ratios, BHC-sponsored PI-MMFs did not experience larger redemptions than non-BHC-sponsored PI-MMFs. In addition, we show that expenses ratios increased with BHCs’ ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 21-07

Report
The rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that the firms experienced and the events that ultimately led the government to take action in an effort to stabilize housing and financial markets. We describe the various resolution options available to policymakers at the time and evaluate the success of the choice of conservatorship, and other actions ...
Staff Reports , Paper 719

Report
Pandemic Lockdown: The Role of Government Commitment

This paper studies lockdown policy in a dynamic economy without government commitment. Lockdown imposes a cap on labor supply, which improves health prospects at the cost of economic output and consumption. A government would like to commit to the extent of future lockdowns in order to guarantee an economic outlook that supports efficient levels of investment into intermediate inputs. However, such a commitment is not credible, since investments are sunk at the time when the government chooses a lockdown. As a result, lockdown under lack of commitment deviates from the optimal policy. Rules ...
Staff Report , Paper 627

Journal Article
Introduction to Special Issue: The Appropriate Role of Government in U.S. Mortgage Markets

The U.S. mortgage finance system was one of the focal points of the 2007-08 financial crisis, yet legislative decisions about the appropriate role of the federal government in the system remain unsettled. Policy deliberations have focused on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?the two enormous government-sponsored enterprises that were placed into federal conservatorship in September 2008. The two GSEs have long been the centerpieces of a mortgage finance system that relies on capital market financing of U.S. residential mortgages. This volume contains eight articles that touch on several key ...
Economic Policy Review , Issue 24-3 , Pages 1-10

Journal Article
COVID-19: Fiscal Implications and Financial Stability in Developing Countries

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike any other crisis that we have experienced in that it hit all economies in the world at the same time, compromising the risk-sharing ability of nations. At the onset of the pandemic, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) jointly pledged 1.16 trillion U.S. dollars to help emerging economies deal with COVID-19. Would this amount have been enough to preserve financial stability in a worst case scenario, and what were the fiscal implications of the pandemic? In this article we aim to answer these questions by documenting the size of the ...
Review , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , Pages 137-149

Working Paper
Withstanding great recession like China

The Great Recession was characterized by two related phenomena: (i) a jobless recovery and (ii) a permanent drop in aggregate output. Data show that the United States, Europe, and even countries with lesser ties to the international financial system have suffered large permanent losses in aggregate output and employment since the financial crisis, despite unprecedented monetary injections. However, the symptoms of the Great Recession were not observed in China, despite a 45% permanent drop in its exports one of the largest trade collapses in world history since the Great Depression. Our ...
Working Papers , Paper 2014-7

Report
Losses from Natural Disasters: County-Level Data on Damages, Injuries, and Fatalities

We introduce the first comprehensive publicly available dataset on county-level damages, injuries, and fatalities from natural disasters in the U.S. and present a few facts on the economic and human costs of extreme climate events. Our source is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Events Database, which reports losses for geographic areas largely defined based on meteorological science. We map these areas to counties using geographic tools together with the spatial distribution of population, housing stock, and economic activity. Our estimates are particularly ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1156

Working Paper
Explaining the Life Cycle of Bank-Sponsored Money Market Funds: An Application of the Regulatory Dialectic

In this paper, we present empirical evidence of the regulatory dialectic in the prime institutional money market fund (PI-MMF) industry. The “regulatory dialectic”, developed by Kane (1977, 1981), describes how banks and regulators react to each other. For decades, a cap on commercial deposit interest rates fueled dramatic growth in bank-sponsored PI-MMFs as a form of shadow banking. During the growth period, banks with more commercial deposits were more likely to enter the PI-MMF industry in an effort to keep their commercial customers in affiliated subsidiaries. However, the 2008 crisis ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 24-01

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