Search Results
Working Paper
Superstar Economists: Coauthorship networks and research output
We study the impact of research collaborations in coauthorship networks on research output and how optimal funding can maximize it. Through the links in the collaboration network, researchers create spillovers not only to their direct coauthors but also to researchers indirectly linked to them. We characterize the equilibrium when agents collaborate in multiple and possibly overlapping projects. We bring our model to the data by analyzing the coauthorship network of economists registered in the RePEc Author Service. We rank the authors and research institutions according to their contribution ...
Working Paper
Interregional Migration and Housing Vacancy: Theory and Empirics
We examine homeowner vacancy rate interdependencies over time and space through the channel of migration. Our theoretical analysis extends the Wheaton (1990) search and matching model for housing by incorporating interregional spillovers due to some households’ desires to migrate between regions and by allowing for regime-switching behavior. Our empirical analysis of vacancy rates for the entire U.S. and for Census regions provides visual evidence for the possibility of regime-switching behavior. We explicitly test our model by estimating basic Vector Autoregression (VAR) and ...
Discussion Paper
Assessing Contagion Risk in a Financial Network
Since the 2008 financial crisis, there has been an explosion of research trying to understand and quantify the default spillovers that can arise through counterparty risk. This first of two posts delves into the analysis of financial network contagion through this spillover channel. The authors introduce a framework, originally developed by Eisenberg and Noe, that is useful for thinking about default cascades.
Report
International banking and cross-border effects of regulation: lessons from the United States
Domestic prudential regulation can have unintended effects across borders and may be less effective in an environment where banks operate globally. Using U.S. micro-banking data for the first quarter of 2000 through the third quarter of 2013, this study shows that some regulatory changes indeed spill over. First, a foreign country?s tightening of limits on loan-to-value ratios and local currency reserve requirements increase lending growth in the United States through the U.S. branches and subsidiaries of foreign banks. Second, a foreign tightening of capital requirements shifts lending by ...
Working Paper
Local Fiscal Multipliers, Negative Spillovers and the Macroeconomy
This paper analyzes the impact of within-state military spending and national military spending on a state's employment. I estimate that, while within-state spending increases that state's employment (i.e., a positive local effect), an increase in national military spending ceteris paribus decreases employment in the state (i.e., a negative spillover effect). The combined local and spillover effects imply an aggregate employment effect that is close to zero. The estimates are consistent with a resource reallocation explanation: Persons take jobs in or move to a state with increased military ...
Working Paper
Credit Default Swaps in General Equilibrium: Spillovers, Credit Spreads, and Endogenous Default
This paper highlights two new effects of credit default swap markets (CDS) in a general equilibrium setting. First, when firms' cash flows are correlated, CDSs impact the cost of capital{credit spreads{and investment for all firms, even those that are not CDS reference entities. Second, when firms internalize the credit spread changes, the incentive to issue safe rather than risky bonds is fundamentally altered. Issuing safe debt requires a transfer of profits from good states to bad states to ensure full repayment. Alternatively, issuing risky bonds maximizes profits in good states at the ...
Working Paper
What Fuels the Volatility of Electricity Prices?
We use emergency outages of coal generators as an exogenous source of variation in the power generation stack to study how changes in marginal fuel affect real-time prices. Contrary to anecdotal evidence, we find that wholesale prices are less volatile when natural gas is on the margin more often.
Discussion Paper
The Growing Risk of Spillovers and Spillbacks in the Bank‑NBFI Nexus
Nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) are growing, but banks support that growth via funding and liquidity insurance. The transformation of activities and risks from banks to a bank-NBFI nexus may have benefits in normal states of the world, as it may result in overall growth in (especially, credit) markets and widen access to a wide range of financial services, but the system may be disproportionately exposed to financial and economic instability when aggregate tail risk materializes. In this post, we consider the systemic implications of the observed build-up of bank-NBFI connections ...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy Spillovers, Capital Controls and Exchange Rate Flexibility, and the Financial Channel of Exchange Rates
We assess the empirical validity of the trilemma (or impossible trinity) in the 2000s for a large sample of advanced and emerging market economies. To do so, we estimate Taylor-rule type monetary policy reaction functions, relating the local policy rate to real-time forecasts of domestic fundamentals, global variables, as well as the base-country policy rate. In the regressions, we explore variations in the sensitivity of local to base-country policy rates across different degrees of exchange rate flexibility and capital controls. We find that the data are in general consistent with the ...
Working Paper
A Cup Runneth Over: Fiscal Policy Spillovers from the 2009 Recovery Act
This paper studies the effects of interregional spillovers from the government spending component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act). Using cross-county Census Journey to Work commuting data, we cluster U.S. counties into local labor markets, each of which we further partition into two subregions. We then compare differential labor market outcomes and Recovery Act spending at the regional and subregional levels using instrumental variables. Our instrument is the sum of spending by federal agencies not instructed to allocate Recovery Act funds according to ...