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Working Paper
Monetary Policy Shocks: Data or Methods?
Different series of high-frequency monetary shocks can have a correlation coefficient as low as 0.5 and the same sign in only two-thirds of observations. Both data and methods drive these differences, which are starkest when the federal funds rate is at its effective lower bound. Methods that exploit the differential responsiveness of short- and long-term asset prices can incorporate additional information. After documenting differences in monetary shocks, we explore their consequence for inference. We find that empirical estimates of monetary policy transmission from local projections and ...
Working Paper
How Does the Strength of Monetary Policy Transmission Depend on Real Economic Activity?
We study the relationship between the strength of the bank credit channel (BCC) of monetary policy and real GDP growth in the United States using quarterly commercial bank level data between 1986 and 2008. We find that the BCC was significantly stronger during periods of low economic growth. Monetary policy is more effective through this channel in spurring economic activity during periods of low growth, rather than in cooling the economy when growth is high. Furthermore, we find that the BCC operated through a broader range of loan categories and banks than previously documented, ...
Working Paper
Inflation Disagreement Weakens the Power of Monetary Policy
We present empirical evidence that household inflation disagreement weakens the power of forward guidance and conventional monetary policy shocks. The attenuation effect is stronger when inflation forecasts are positively skewed and it is not driven by endogenous responses of inflation disagreement to contemporaneous shocks. These empirical observations can be rationalized by a model featuring heterogeneous beliefs about the central banks' inflation target. An agent who perceives higher future inflation also perceives a lower real interest rate and thus borrows more to finance consumption, ...
Working Paper
Financial Institutions’ Business Models and the Global Transmission of Monetary Policy
Global financial institutions play an important role in channeling funds across countries and, therefore, transmitting monetary policy from one country to another. In this paper, we study whether such international transmission depends on financial institutions' business models. In particular, we use Dutch, Spanish, and U.S. confidential supervisory data to test whether the transmission operates differently through banks, insurance companies, and pension funds. We find marked heterogeneity in the transmission of monetary policy across the three types of institutions, across the three banking ...
Working Paper
The Transmission of Monetary Policy through Bank Lending : The Floating Rate Channel
We describe and test a mechanism through which outstanding bank loans affect the firm balance sheet channel of monetary policy transmission. Unlike other debt, most bank loans have floating rates mechanically tied to monetary policy rates. Hence, monetary policy-induced changes to floating rates affect the liquidity, balance sheet strength, and investment of financially constrained firms that use bank debt. We show that firms---especially financially constrained firms---with more unhedged bank debt display stronger sensitivity of their stock price, cash holdings, sales, inventory, and fixed ...
Working Paper
Inflation Measured Every Day Keeps Adverse Responses Away: Temporal Aggregation and Monetary Policy Transmission
Using daily inflation data from the Billion Prices Project [Cavallo and Rigobon (2016)], we show how temporal aggregation biases estimates of monetary policy transmission. We argue that the information mismatch between private agents and the econometrician —the source of temporal aggregation bias —is equally important as the more studied mismatch between private agents and the central bank (the “Fed information effect”). We find that the adverse response of daily inflation to high-frequency monetary policy shocks is short-lived, if present at all, in impulse responses from both local ...
Working Paper
HANK Comes of Age
We study the aggregate and distributional effects of monetary policy in a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model that explicitly represents the life cycle of households. The model matches the age patterns in the level and dispersion of labor income and financial wealth in the U.S. despite the absence of preference heterogeneity and portfolio adjustment costs. Monetary policy affects the consumption of young households mainly through labor income and the consumption of old households mainly through asset returns. More than half of the aggregate consumption response to an expansionary monetary ...