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Journal Article
Are district presidents more conservative than board governors?
It is widely believed that the Federal Open Market Committee policy votes of Federal Reserve Bank presidents are more "conservative" than those of their Board governor counterparts. In both academia and Congress, the suspicion runs deep that the political appointment procedure exercised over Federal Reserve Board governors-nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate-results in monetary policy that is more concerned with output and less concerned with inflation than the policy produced by the more politically independent District Bank presidents. ; This article examines the ...
Journal Article
Globalization and U.S. inflation
Estimates of the Phillips curve suggest that the low level of unemployment over the last few years should have produced a fairly significant increase in the rate of inflation, yet inflation has continued to fall. Some take this occurrence as evidence that the NAIRU has declined. Others argue that social factors, such as recent movements of employee health coverage to health maintenance organizations have temporarily masked inflation. Perhaps the most widely cited explanation for the surprisingly good inflation performance of late concerns the increasing sensitivity of the U.S. economy to ...
Journal Article
Issues in economics: what is the cost of deflation?
A steady decline in the core rate of inflation over the past few years has prompted the question: What are the economic consequences when the inflation rate drops below zero?
Journal Article
Central bank flexibility and the drawbacks to currency unification
Recently, the benefits to monetary unification have been widely heralded. Advocates of European, as well as East and West German, monetary integration point repeatedly to the advantages the United States derives from possessing a single currency. Yet, the losses resulting from this policy have too often been ignored. ; This article briefly reviews the costs and benefits of currency integration as articulated in the traditional optimal currency area literature. For the first time a full-employment model is used to examine the cost to currency unification derived from diversity among countries ...
Working Paper
Empirical estimates of changing inflation dynamics
This paper provides an array of empirical evidence bearing on potentially important changes in the dynamics of U.S. inflation. We examine the overall performance of Phillips curves relative to some well-known benchmarks, the efficiency with which the Federal Reserve's Greenbook forecasts of inflation use real activity information, and shifts in the key determinants of the reduced-form "triangle model" of inflation. We develop a structural model-based interpretation of observed reduced-form shifts and conduct a reduced-form assessment of the relationship between core and headline measures of ...
Working Paper
Redlining in Boston: do mortgage lenders discriminate against neighborhoods?
Historically, lenders have been accused of "redlining" minority neighborhoods as well as refusing to lend to minority applicants. Considerable bank regulation is designed to prevent both actions. However, the strong correlation between race and neighborhood makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of geographic discrimination from the effects of racial discrimination. Previous studies have failed to untangle these two influences, in part, because of severe omitted variable bias. The data set in this paper allows the distinct effects of race and geography to be identified, and it shows ...
Working Paper
Back to the future: monetary policy and the twin deficits
There has been a significant correlation between inward foreign direct investment in the United States and the U.S. real exchange rate since the 1970s. Two alternative reasons for this relationship are that the real exchange rate affects the relative cost of production and that the real exchange rate alters reTative wealth across countries. In this paper we explore these alternatives by examining the determinants of four measures of inward foreign direct investment to the United States from seven industrial countries over the period 1979 to 1988. We find strong evidence that relative wealth ...
Working Paper
Should the Fed regularly evaluate its monetary policy framework?
Would a more open and regular evaluation of the monetary policy framework improve policy in the United States? Even when considering a relatively short timeframe that spans the 1960s to the present, it is possible to point to many significant changes to the framework. Some of the changes were precipitated by acute economic conditions, while others were considered and implemented only gradually as a response to long-standing problems with the framework. But the process for evaluating and changing frameworks to date has not always been transparent, and changes have not always been timely. Could ...
Working Paper
Does Fed policy reveal a ternary mandate?
This paper examines the role of financial instability in setting monetary policy. The paper begins with a model that examines the interaction of monetary and regulatory policy. It then empirically tests whether financial instability has affected monetary policy. One important innovation is to construct a measure of financial instability directly related to the FOMC financial instability concerns expressed in FOMC meeting transcripts. We find that, even after controlling for forecasts of inflation and unemployment, the word counts of terms related to financial instability do correlate with ...
Working Paper
Inflation dynamics when inflation is near zero
This paper discusses the likely evolution of U.S. inflation in the near and medium term on the basis of (1) past U.S. experience with very low levels of inflation, (2) the most recent Japanese experience with deflation, and (3) recent U.S. micro evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity. Our findings question the view that stable long-run inflation expectations and downward nominal wage rigidity will provide sufficient support to prices such that deflation can be avoided. We show that an inflation model fitted on Japanese data over the past 20 years, which accounts for both short- and ...