Search Results
Journal Article
Challenges in identifying interbank loans
Although interbank lending markets play a key role in the financial system, the lack of disaggregated data often makes the analysis of these markets difficult. To address this problem, recent academic papers focusing on unsecured loans of central bank reserves have employed an algorithm in an effort to identify individual transactions that are federal funds loans. The accuracy of the algorithm, however, is not known. The authors of this study conduct a formal test with U.S. data and find that the rate of false positives produced by one of these algorithms is on average 81 percent; the rate of ...
Working Paper
Manning Up and Womaning Down: How Husbands and Wives Report Earnings When She Earns More
To infer social preferences regarding the relative earnings of spouses, we use measurement error in the earnings reported for married couples in the Current Population Survey. We compare the earnings reported for husbands and wives in the survey with their “true” earnings as reported by their employers to tax authorities. Compared with couples where the wife earns just less than the husband, those where she earns just more are 15.9 percentage points more likely to under-report her relative earnings. This pattern reflects the reporting behavior of both husbands and wives and is consistent ...
Working Paper
Survey Incentives, Survey Effort, and Survey Costs
This paper uses the 2007 and 2010 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to investigate how monetary incentives affect the time and effort that interviewers expend during the survey field period, and how these incentives affect effort expended by the survey respondent. The results imply that a larger monetary incentive offer helps reduce contact attempts and time in the field while maintaining data quality and effort during the survey by the respondent. Our results are based on a quasi-experiment that varies which families receive an incentive offer letter. Supporting evidence is ...
Working Paper
Does it Pay to Send Multiple Pre-Paid Incentives? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
To encourage survey participation and improve sample representativeness, the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) offers an unconditional pre-paid monetary incentive and separate post-paid incentive upon survey completion. We conducted a pre-registered between-subject randomized control experiment within the 2022 SCF, with at least 1,200 households per experimental group, to examine whether changing the pre-paid incentive structure affects survey outcomes. We assess the effects of: (1) altering the total dollar value of the pre-paid incentive (“incentive effect”), (2) giving two identical ...
Working Paper
Mode effects in mixed-mode economic surveys: Insights from a randomized experiment
Web-based surveys have become increasingly common in economic, marketing, and other social science research. However, questions exist about the comparability of data gathered using a web interview and data gathered using more traditional survey modes, particularly for surveys on household economic behavior. Differences between data from different survey modes may arise through two different mechanisms: sample selectivity due to (lack of) web access and mode effects. This study leverages the randomized experimental design of the mixed-mode Cognitive Economics Study to examine mode effects ...
Report
Evaluating the quality of fed funds lending estimates produced from Fedwire payments data
A number of empirical analyses of interbank lending rely on indirect inferences from individual interbank transactions extracted from payments data using algorithms. In this paper, we conduct an evaluation to assess the ability of identifying overnight U.S. fed funds activity from Fedwire payments data. We find evidence that the estimates extracted from the data are statistically significantly correlated with banks' fed funds borrowing as reported on the FRY-9C. We find similar associations for fed funds lending, although the correlations are lower. To be conservative, we believe that the ...