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Discussion Paper
The International Spillover of U.S. Monetary Policy via Global Production Linkages
The recent era of globalization has witnessed growing cross-country trade integration as firms’ production chains have spread across the world, and with stock market returns becoming more correlated across countries. While research has predominantly focused on how financial integration impacts the propagation of shocks across international financial markets, trade also influences these cross-border spillovers. In particular, one important aspect, highlighted by the recent work of di Giovanni and Hale (2020), is how the global production network influences the transmission of U.S. monetary ...
Discussion Paper
Firm-Level Shocks and GDP Growth: The Case of Boeing’s 737 MAX Production Pause
Large firms play an integral role in aggregate economic activity owing to their size and production linkages. Events specific to these large firms can thus have significant effects on the macroeconomy. Quantifying these effects is tricky, however, given the complexity of the production process and the difficulty in identifying firm-level events. The recent pause in Boeing’s 737 MAX production is a striking example of such an event or “shock” to a large firm. This post applies a basic framework that is grounded in economic theory to provide a back-of-the envelope calculation of how the ...
Working Paper
Trade Uncertainty and U.S. Bank Lending
This paper uses U.S. loan-level credit register data and the 2018–2019 Trade War to test for the effects of international trade uncertainty on domestic credit supply. We exploit cross-sectional heterogeneity in banks’ ex-ante exposure to trade uncertainty and find that an increase in trade uncertainty is associated with a contraction in bank lending to all firms irrespective of the uncertainty that the firms face. This baseline result holds for lending at the intensive and extensive margins. We document two channels underlying the estimated credit supply effect: a wait-and-see channel by ...
Discussion Paper
Flood-Prone Basement Housing in New York City and the Impact on Low- and Moderate-Income Renters
Hurricane Ida, which struck New York in early September 2021, exposed the region’s vulnerability to extreme rainfall and inland flooding. The storm created massive damage to the housing stock, particularly low-lying units. This post measures the storm’s impact on basement housing stock and, following the focus on more-at-risk populations from the two previous entries in this series, analyzes the attendant impact on low-income and immigrant populations. We find that basements in select census tracts are at high risk of flooding, affecting an estimated 10 percent of low-income and immigrant ...
Discussion Paper
How Much Did Supply Constraints Boost U.S. Inflation?
What factors are behind the recent inflation surge has been a huge topic of debate amongst academics and policymakers. We know that pandemic-related supply constraints such as labor shortages and supply chain bottlenecks have been key factors pushing inflation higher. These bottlenecks started with the pandemic (lockdowns, sick workers) and were made worse by the push arising from increased demand caused by very expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. Our analysis of the relative importance of supply-side versus demand-side factors finds 60 percent of U.S. inflation over the 2019-21 period ...
Discussion Paper
Global Supply Chain Pressure Index: May 2022 Update
Supply chain disruptions continue to be a major challenge as the world economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, recent developments related to geopolitics and the pandemic (particularly in China) could put further strains on global supply chains. In a January post, we first presented the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), a parsimonious global measure designed to capture supply chain disruptions using a range of indicators. We revisited our index in March, and today we are launching the GSCPI as a standalone product, with new readings to be published each month. In ...
Report
Pandemic-Era Inflation Drivers and Global Spillovers
We estimate a multi-country, multi-sector New Keynesian model to quantify the drivers of domestic inflation during 2020–23 in several countries, including the United States. The model matches observed inflation together with sector-level prices and wages. We further measure the relative importance of different types of shocks on inflation across countries over time. The key mechanism, the international transmission of demand, supply and energy shocks through global linkages helps us to match the behavior of the USD/EUR exchange rate. The quantification exercise yields four key findings. ...