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Working Paper
Updates to the Sampling of Wealthy Families in the Survey of Consumer Finances
Participation in household surveys has fallen over time, making it harder to produce a household survey-like the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)-in a timely manner. To address these challenges, the reference year of the sampling frame data for the 2016 SCF wealthy oversample was shifted back one year, allowing the oversample to be selected earlier than the past. In implementing this change, though, we risk identifying an outdated set of families and introducing variability in the sampling process. However, we show that the set of families selected in the new frame are observationally ...
Discussion Paper
Fiscal Drag from the State and Local Sector?
With July just around the corner, most cities and states are preparing for the start of a new fiscal year. Since the start of the recent recession, some have worried that fiscal stress on the sector would result in massive municipal bond defaults. At the end of 2011, many breathed a sigh of relief as aggregate state government revenues finally re-attained the peak they had achieved before tumbling during and after the recession. Unfortunately, relief may be premature. When adjusted for inflation, 2011 state tax revenues were still below their levels of four years ago, and local tax revenue ...
Discussion Paper
The SOMA Portfolio through Time
The System Open Market Account (SOMA) is a portfolio held by the Federal Reserve to support monetary policy implementation and reflects assets and liabilities (domestic, and some foreign) acquired through open market operations. The SOMA has attracted greater attention in recent years as, with the federal funds rate near its lower bound, the size and composition of the domestic portfolio has been used as an active monetary policy instrument. Earnings on the SOMA portfolio represent a significant amount of the Fed?s income and, given the substantial increase in the size of the portfolio and ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Effects of Government Spending in China
Government spending plays an important role in determining economic performances in China. Its macroeconomic effects are analyzed in this paper. We show that government spending in China (i) Granger-causes output, consumption and investment booms as well as inflation and (ii) has a multiplier larger than 1. The large multiplier effects are found not only in aggregate time-series data but also in panel data at the provincial level. We also provide a theoretical model and Monte Carlo analysis to rationalize our empirical findings. Our theoretical and Monte Carlo analyses support the large ...
Discussion Paper
What if? A Counterfactual SOMA Portfolio
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has actively used changes in the size and composition of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) portfolio to implement monetary policy in recent years. These actions have been intended to promote the Committee?s mandate to foster maximum employment and price stability but, as discussed in a prior post, have also generated high levels of portfolio income, contributing in turn to elevated remittances to the U.S. Treasury. In the future, as the accommodative stance of monetary policy is eventually normalized, net portfolio income is likely to decline from ...