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Journal Article
Brexit: Whither the Pound?
People of the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union last June, a process dubbed ?Brexit.? The persistent depreciation of the British pound since the vote suggests that U.K. economic conditions will be weakened over the long run following the separation from the EU. This projection of a persistent economic loss is based on the expected reversal of earlier gains from trade with other EU members and reduced cross-border labor flows.
Journal Article
Commodity prices and PCE inflation
Commodity prices have soared several times in recent years, raising concerns that overall inflation could rise substantially. However, crops, oil, and natural gas make up only about 5% of the cost of U.S. consumer goods and services. Thus, about one percentage point of the 10% cumulative inflation since 2007 reflects price rises in these important commodity categories. When the contribution of these commodities is subtracted from overall inflation, the resulting pattern is remarkably similar to that of core inflation, which excludes food and energy prices.
Working Paper
U.S. Monetary Policy and Fluctuations of International Bank Lending
There is no consensus in the empirical literature on the direction in which U.S. monetary policy affects cross-border bank lending. We find robust evidence that the impact of the U.S. federal funds rate on cross-border bank lending in a given period depends on the prevailing international capital flows regime and on the level of the two main components of the federal funds rate: macro fundamentals and monetary policy stance. During episodes in which bank lending from advanced to emerging economies is booming, the relationship between the federal funds rate and cross-border bank lending is ...
Working Paper
Persistence of Regional Inequality in China
Regional inequality in China appears to be persistent and even growing in the last two decades. We study potential explanations for this phenomenon. After making adjustments for the difference in the cost of living across provinces, we find that some of the inequality in real wages could be attributed to differences in quality of labor, industry composition, labor supply elasticities, and geographical location of provinces. These factors, taken together, explain about half of the cross-province real wage difference. Interestingly, we find that inter-province redistribution did not help offset ...
Working Paper
Sovereign debt crises and credit to the private sector
We argue that, through its effect on aggregate demand and country risk premia, sovereign debt restructuring can adversely affect the private sector?s access to foreign capital markets. Using fixed effect analysis, we estimate that sovereign debt rescheduling episodes are indeed systematically accompanied by a decline in foreign credit to emerging market private firms, both during debt renegotiations and for over two years after the agreements are reached. This decline is large (over 20%), statistically significant, and robust when we control for a host of fundamentals. We find that this ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policy Design and Inflation: The COVID-19 Pandemic Experience
Fiscal support measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic varied in their targeted beneficiaries. Relying on variability across 10 large economies, we study differences in the inflationary effects of fiscal support measures targeting consumers or businesses. Because conventional measures of real activity were distorted, we control for the underlying state of real economy using households sentiment data. We find that fiscal support measures to consumers, but not firms, had inflationary effects that manifested 5 weeks following the announcement and peaked at 12 weeks. The magnitude of the ...
Working Paper
Do banks propagate debt market shocks?
Over the years, U.S. banks have increasingly relied on the bond market to finance their business. This created the potential for a link between the bond market and the corporate sector whereby borrowers, including those that do not rely on bond funding, became exposed to the conditions in the bond market. We investigate the importance of this link. Our results show that when the cost to access the bond market goes up, banks that rely on bond financing charge higher interest rates on their loans. Banks that rely exclusively on deposit funding follow bond financing banks and increase the ...
Working Paper
Who Drove the Boom in Euro-Denominated Bond Issues?
We make use of micro-level data for over 45,000 private bond issues by over 5000 firms from 22 countries in 1990-2006 to analyze the impact that the launch of the EMU had on their currency denomination. The use of the micro data allows us to isolate the "euro effect" on new and seasoned bond issuers while conditioning on individual issue characteristics. To our knowledge, ours is the first systematic analysis of this topic at the micro level. We find that the impact on new issuers is larger than on seasoned issuers and that most of the increase in the euro-denominated bond issuance by ...
Journal Article
The Economics of Climate Change: A First Fed Conference
To better understand the implications of climate change for the financial sector and the broader economy, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently hosted a conference on the economics of climate change to gather and debate the latest analyses from universities and policy institutions, nationally and abroad. It was the first Fed-sponsored conference devoted to investigating the economic and financial consequences and risks arising from climate change and potential policy responses.
Journal Article
The U.S. content of “Made in China”
Goods and services from China accounted for only 2.7% of U.S. personal consumption expenditures in 2010, of which less than half reflected the actual costs of Chinese imports. The rest went to U.S. businesses and workers transporting, selling, and marketing goods carrying the "Made in China" label. Although the fraction is higher when the imported content of goods made in the United States is considered, Chinese imports still make up only a small share of total U.S. consumer spending. This suggests that Chinese inflation will have little direct effect on U.S. consumer prices.