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Jel Classification:G01 

Report
Nonlinearity and flight to safety in the risk-return trade-off for stocks and bonds

We document a highly significant, strongly nonlinear dependence of stock and bond returns on past equity market volatility as measured by the VIX. We propose a new estimator for the shape of the nonlinear forecasting relationship that exploits additional variation in the cross section of returns. The nonlinearities are mirror images for stocks and bonds, revealing flight to safety: expected returns increase for stocks when volatility increases from moderate to high levels, while they decline for Treasury securities. These findings provide support for dynamic asset pricing theories where the ...
Staff Reports , Paper 723

Working Paper
Credit booms, banking crises, and the current account

What is the marginal effect of an increase in the private sector debt-to-GDP ratio on the probability of a banking crisis? This paper shows that the marginal effect of rising debt levels depends on an economy's external position. When the current account is in surplus or in balance, the marginal effect of an increase in debt is rather small; a 10 percentage point increase in the private sector debt-to-GDP ratio increases the probability of a crisis by about 1 to 2 percentage points. However, when the economy is running a sizable current account deficit, implying that any increase in the debt ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 178

Report
The Prudential Toolkit with Shadow Banking

Several countries now require banks or money market funds to impose state-contingent costs on short-term creditors to absorb financial stress. We study these requirements as part of the broader prudential toolkit in a model with five key ingredients: banks may face an aggregate stress state with high withdrawals; a fire-sale externality motivates a mix of non-contingent and state-contingent regulation; banks may use shadow technologies to circumvent regulation; parameters of the shadow technologies may be private information; and bailouts may occur. We characterize the optimal policy for ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1142

Working Paper
The Anatomy of Financial Vulnerabilities and Crises

We extend the framework used in Aikman, Kiley, Lee, Palumbo, and Warusawitharana (2015) that maps vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system to a broader set of advanced and emerging economies. Our extension tracks a broader set of vulnerabilities and, therefore, captures signs of different types of crises. The typical anatomy of the evolution of vulnerabilities before and after a financial crisis is as follows. Pressures in asset valuations materialize, and a build-up of imbalances in the external, financial, and nonfinancial sectors follows. A financial crisis is typically followed by a ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1191

Working Paper
Fiscal Multipliers and Financial Crises

I study the effects of the US fiscal policy response to the Great Recession, accounting both for standard tools and financial sector interventions. A nonlinear model calibrated to the US allows me to study the state-dependent effects of different fiscal policies. I combine the model with data on the fiscal policy response to find that the fall in consumption would have been almost 50% larger in the absence of that response for a cumulative loss of 7.18%. Transfers and bank recapitalizations yielded the largest fiscal multipliers through new transmission channels that arise from linkages ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-023

Working Paper
Credit and Liquidity Policies during Large Crises

We compare firms’ financials during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19. While the two crises featured similar increases in credit spreads, debt and liquid assets decreased during the GFC but increased during COVID-19. In the cross-section, leverage was the primary determinant of credit spreads and investment during the GFC, but liquidity was more important during COVID-19. We augment a quantitative model of firm capital structure with a motive to hold liquid assets. The GFC resembled a combination of productivity and financial shocks, while COVID-19 also featured liquidity ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-035

Discussion Paper
The Term Spread as a Predictor of Financial Instability

The term spread is the difference between interest rates on short- and long-dated government securities. It is often referred to as a predictor of the business cycle. In particular, inversions of the yield curve—a negative term spread—are considered an early warning sign. Such inversions typically receive a lot of attention in policy debates when they occur. In this post, we point to another property of the term spread, namely its predictive ability for financial crisis events, both internationally and in historical U.S. data. We study the predictive power of the term spread for financial ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20211124

Working Paper
The Pass-Through of Sovereign Risk

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of sovereign credit risk in a business cycle model where banks are exposed to domestic government debt. The news of a future sovereign default hampers financial intermediation. First, it tightens the funding constraints of banks, reducing their available resources to finance firms (liquidity channel). Second, it generates a precautionary motive for banks to deleverage (risk channel). I estimate the model using Italian data, finding that i) sovereign credit risk was recessionary and that ii) the risk channel was sizable. I then use the model ...
Working Papers , Paper 722

Working Paper
Tax Revolts and Sovereign Defaults

Protests and fiscal crises often coincide, with complex causal dynamics at play. We examine the interaction between tax revolts and sovereign risk using a quantitative structural model calibrated to Argentina during the Macri administration (2015-2019). In the model, the government can be controlled by political parties with different preferences for redistribution. Households may opt to revolt in response to the fiscal policies of the ruler. While revolts entail economic costs, they also increase the likelihood of political turnover. Our model mirrors the data by generating political crises ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2024-07

Working Paper
Upstream, Downstream & Common Firm Shocks

We develop a multi-sector DSGE model to calculate upstream and downstream industry exposure networks from U.S. input-output tables and test the relative importance of shocks from each direction by comparing these with estimated networks of firms? equity return responses to one another. The correlations between the upstream exposure and equity return networks are large and statistically significant, while the downstream exposure networks have lower ? but still positive ? correlations that are not statistically significant. These results suggest a low short-term elasticity of substitution ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 360

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