Search Results
Working Paper
Discretion, wage indexation, and inflation
Journal Article
Indexation: a reasonable response to inflation
Journal Article
The name is bond--indexed bond
Will the Treasury Department's new inflation-indexed bond prove to be the bond "with the Midas touch"?
Working Paper
Consistent economic indexes for the 50 states.
In the late 1980s James Stock and Mark Watson developed for the U.S. economy an alternative coincident index to the one now published by the Conference Board. They used the Kalman filter to estimate a latent dynamic factor for the national economy and designated the common factor as the coincident index. This paper uses the Stock/Watson methodology to estimate a consistent set of coincident indexes for the 50 states. These indexes provide researchers with a comprehensive monthly measure of economic activity that can be used to examine a number of state and regional issues.
Working Paper
Estimating the cost of U.S. indexed bonds
A presentation of an equilibrium bond-pricing model driven by two stochastic factors: the real interest rate and the expected rate of inflation. The models parameters are estimated using a maximum-likelihood technique based on a Kalman filter.
Journal Article
Indexed bonds as an aid to monetary policy
A measure of the publics expectation of inflation would assist the Fed in formulating monetary policy. In order to create such a measure, the U.S. Treasury could issue its debt in two forms: standard debt and debt indexed for inflation. The difference in yield on these two forms of debt would measure the publics expectation of inflation.
Journal Article
Benefits and limitations of inflation indexed Treasury bonds
In recent years, members of Congress and academia have repeatedly urged the U.S. Treasury to issue some portion of its debt in the form of inflation indexed bonds. With an indexed bond, the interest and maturity value are adjusted by the rate of inflation over the life of the bond. Because the cash flow of an indexed bond is adjusted for inflation, the bond's real value does not vary with inflation, protecting investors and issuers alike from inflation risk.> Inflation indexed bonds would be a fundamental innovation in U.S. financial markets, providing benefits to investors, the Treasury, and ...
Monograph
Indexing inflation: remedy or malady?
originally appeared in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Business Review, March 1975, p. 3-13
Working Paper
A Simple Measure of Anchoring for Short-Run Expected Inflation in FIRE Models
We show that the fraction of non-reoptimizing firms that index prices to the inflation target, rather than lagged inflation, provides a simple measure of anchoring for short-run expected inflation in a New Keynesian model with full-information rational expectations. Higher values of the anchoring measure imply less sensitivity of rational inflation forecasts to movements in actual inflation. The approximate value of the model’s anchoring measure can be inferred from observable data generated by the model itself, as given by 1 minus the autocorrelation statistic for quarterly inflation. We ...
Journal Article
Disentangling diverse measures: a survey of financial stress indexes
The recent financial crisis helped emphasize the need for measures of financial conditions. In the wake of the crisis, several researchers and institutions?both private sector and central bank?developed measures of financial stress. These measures are intended to capture, among other things, the liquidity in financial markets and potentially forecast changes in real economic conditions. Unfortunately, there is no agreement about which variables should be included in a measure of stress. The authors survey a number of financial stress indexes, comparing the datasets from which they are ...