Search Results
Journal Article
Federal Reserve: Good Data is Hard to Find
Fed officials frequently describe their monetary policy decisions as data dependent. As the central bank has navigated the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, a common refrain in its policy statements is that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will "carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks" when considering further adjustments."We are looking at the data to guide us in what we should do," Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at the press conference following the FOMC's meeting at the end of January.The demand for data in economics as a whole has only grown ...
Briefing
Creating Data Citation Templates for Economics
Copy and paste citation tools exist for traditional academic publication types from places like Citation Machine or Google Scholar, but similar plugins for datasets are scarce. In response, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City built a data citation template for all acquired proprietary data sources and selected open data sources to allow economists to copy and paste data citations into their preferred word processing program.
Discussion Paper
Monetizing Privacy with Central Bank Digital Currencies
In prior research, we documented evidence suggesting that digital payment adoptions have accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While digitalization of payment activity improves data utilization by firms, it can also infringe upon consumers’ right to privacy. Drawing from a recent paper, this blog post explains how payment data acquired by firms impacts market structure and consumer welfare. Then, we discuss the implications of introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that offers consumers a low-cost, privacy-preserving electronic means of payment—essentially, digital ...
Speech
The Federal Reserve System and Community Development: The Why, The How, and The What 2017 Policy Summit on Housing, Human Capital, and Inequality, Cleveland, OH
Over the past 14 years, the Policy Summit has brought together community development practitioners, researchers, funders, policymakers, and others interested in strengthening our communities so that all people have the opportunity to productively engage in our economy and to share in its benefits. As is clear from the many conversations we?ve had over the past two days ? and over the past 14 years of this summit ? there are no easy answers. But there are some answers. I will touch on ?the why, the how, and the what? of this work: why we at the Fed see our community development efforts as ...
Working Paper
Evaluating Local Language Models: An Application to Bank Earnings Calls
This study evaluates the performance of local large language models (LLMs) in interpreting financial texts, compared with closed-source, cloud-based models. We first introduce new benchmarking tasks for assessing LLM performance in analyzing financial and economic texts and explore the refinements needed to improve its performance. Our benchmarking results suggest local LLMs are a viable tool for general natural language processing analysis of these texts. We then leverage local LLMs to analyze the tone and substance of bank earnings calls in the post-pandemic era, including calls conducted ...
Newsletter
Ethical Use of Data with FRED
What are the ethical considerations for researchers who use data? This data primer describes standards for gathering, analyzing, storing, and distributing data for new data users and serves as a reference for advanced data users.
Speech
Elementary, Dear Data
Remarks at 2023 U.S. Treasury Market Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
Anatomy of the Bank Runs in March 2023
Runs have plagued the banking system for centuries and returned to prominence with the bank failures in early 2023. In a traditional run—such as depicted in classic photos from the Great Depression—depositors line up in front of a bank to withdraw their cash. This is not how modern bank runs occur: today, depositors move money from a risky to a safe bank through electronic payment systems. In a recently published staff report, we use data on wholesale and retail payments to understand the bank run of March 2023. Which banks were run on? How were they different from other banks? And how ...
Working Paper
Introducing a Framework for Measuring the Quantitative Benefits of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
This paper reviews privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and explores their benefits when used to make traditional payment processes more private. PETs can decrease privacy risk by reducing the amount of sensitive information accessible to payment-processing personnel and systems. This paper proposes a framework for quantifying the risk-reduction benefits of PETs. This method can be used to calculate the amount of privacy-risk exposure that may be created by a set of payment activities, estimate the amount by which PETs can decrease that exposure, and compare that quantified benefit against ...