Search Results
Journal Article
Expectations for monetary policy liftoff
The Federal Reserve has indicated that it may raise the federal funds rate from its current value near zero in 2015. This forward policy guidance is broadly consistent with expectations from business surveys on the most likely timing for the funds rate liftoff. It also appears in line with estimates of policy liftoff from forward interest rates derived from Treasury yields. However, in interpreting forward rates, it is important to account for the zero lower bound on interest rates.
Working Paper
A Probability-Based Stress Test of Federal Reserve Assets and Income
To support the economy, the Federal Reserve amassed a large portfolio of long-term bonds. We assess the Fed?s associated interest rate risk ? including potential losses to its Treasury securities holdings and declines in remittances to the Treasury. Unlike past examinations of this interest rate risk, we attach probabilities to alternative interest rate scenarios. These probabilities are obtained from a dynamic term structure model that respects the zero lower bound on yields. The resulting probability-based stress test finds that the Fed?s losses are unlikely to be large and remittances are ...
Working Paper
The signaling channel for Federal Reserve bond purchases
Previous research has emphasized the portfolio balance effects of Federal Reserve bond purchases, in which a reduced bond supply lowers term premia. In contrast, we find that such purchases have important signaling effects that lower expected future short term interest rates. Our evidence comes from dynamic term structure models that decompose declines in yields following Fed announcements into changes in risk premia and expected short rates. To overcome problems in measuring term premia, we consider unbiased model estimation and restricted risk price estimation. We also characterize the ...
Discussion Paper
Have postwar economic fluctuations been stabilized?
Previous investigations of whether the volatility of the U.S. economy diminished after World War II have been inconclusive because of questionable prewar macroeconomic aggregates. We examine, more broadly, the hypothesis of the stabilization of the postwar economy by focusing on the duration of business cycles, rather than their amplitude; in the process, we avoid the debate about the quality of prewar aggregates. Using distribution-free statistics, we find clear evidence of postwar duration stabilization in terms of a shift toward longer expansions and shorter contractions. Moreover, we find ...
Journal Article
Publishing central bank interest rate forecasts
Over the past two decades, the Federal Reserve has made significant strides toward greater transparency in the conduct of monetary policy. Most recently, last November, Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) participants?that is, the Federal Reserve Presidents and Governors?started to release their projections for output growth, unemployment, and inflation to the public more frequently and with greater detail than before (Rudebusch 2008). Such transparency can illuminate the FOMC's policy strategies and goals and help inform the public's expectations about future economic developments. Of ...
Journal Article
Climate Change and the Federal Reserve
Climate change describes the current trend toward higher average global temperatures and accompanying environmental shifts such as rising sea levels and more severe storms, floods, droughts, and heat waves. In coming decades, climate change?and efforts to limit that change and adapt to it?will have increasingly important effects on the U.S. economy. These effects and their associated risks are relevant considerations for the Federal Reserve in fulfilling its mandate for macroeconomic and financial stability.
Journal Article
How fast can the new economy grow?
Working Paper
The Bond Premium in a DSGE Model with Long-Run Real and Nominal Risks
The term premium on nominal long-term bonds in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data–an example of the "bond premium puzzle." However, in models of endowment economies, researchers have been able to generate reasonable term premiums by assuming that investors have recursive Epstein-Zin preferences and face long-run economic risks. We show that introducing Epstein-Zin preferences into a canonical DSGE model can also produce a large and variable term premium ...
Journal Article
Central bank inflation targeting
Working Paper
Assessing Nominal Income Rules for Monetary Policy with Model and Data Uncertainty
Nominal income rules for monetary policy have long been debated, but two issues are of particular recent interest. First, there are questions about the performance of such rules over a range of plausible empirical models-especially models with and without rational inflation expectations. Second, there are questions about the performance of these rules in real time using the type of data that is actually available contemporaneously to policymakers rather than final revised data. This paper determines optimal monetary policy rules in the presence of such model uncertainty and real-time data ...