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Working Paper
A model of monetary policy shocks for financial crises and normal conditions
In late 2008, deteriorating economic conditions led the Federal Reserve to lower the federal funds rate to near zero and inject massive liquidity into the financial system through novel facilities. The combination of conventional and unconventional measures complicates the challenging task of characterizing the effects of monetary policy. We develop a novel method of identifying these effects that maintains the classic assumptions that a central bank reacts to output and the price level contemporaneously and may only affect these variables with a lag. A New-Keynesian DSGE model augmented with ...
Journal Article
Introducing the Kansas City Fed's Measure of Policy Rate Uncertainty (KC PRU)
Monitoring uncertainty around the future path of interest rates can help ensure that monetary policy is transmitting to the economy as intended. Because uncertainty is not directly observable, measuring uncertainty about the future policy rate can be difficult. Previous measures often face two key limitations. First, they may be released with a lag, making them less useful as a timely measure of policy rate uncertainty. Second, they may not be available over a long sample, making it difficult to compare measures of current uncertainty with historical context.In this article, Brent Bundick, A. ...
Working Paper
Maintaining the Anchor: An Evaluation of Inflation Targeting in the Face of COVID-19
This paper provides evidence that inflation targeting delivered anchored inflation expectations during the post-2020 inflation surge. Using a macroeconomic model, we illustrate how long-term nominal interest rates respond to an unexpected burst of inflation under both anchored and unanchored inflation expectations. We then evaluate these predictions using high-frequency financial market data from nine advanced economies and illustrate three main findings. First, inflation expectations embedded in asset prices were just as well, or in some countries better anchored, after the pandemic. Second, ...
Journal Article
Has forward guidance been effective?
A. Lee Smith and Thealexa Becker compare forward guidance announcements with changes in the effective federal funds rate and find the two policy measures have had similar macroeconomic effects.
Journal Article
Does the Recent Decline in Household Longer-Term Inflation Expectations Signal a Loss of Confidence in the FOMC?
Households have lowered their longer-term inflation outlooks, but they appear confident in the FOMC?s ability to achieve stable prices.
Working Paper
Maintaining the Anchor: An Evaluation of Inflation Targeting in the Face of COVID-19
This paper provides evidence that inflation targeting delivered well-anchored inflation expectations during the post-2020 inflation surge. Using a macroeconomic model, we first illustrate how long-term nominal interest rates respond to an unexpected burst of inflation under both anchored and unanchored inflation expectations. Then, we evaluate these predictions using high-frequency financial market data from nine advanced economies. Specifically, we examine whether inflation expectations embedded in asset prices remained anchored as inflation climbed in the aftermath of the pandemic. Our ...
Working Paper
Rethinking Central Bank LSAPs: The Power of Market Functioning Purchases
We show that operationally similar central bank asset purchases can have markedly different effects. Combining security-level data on the Federal Reserve’s duration-adjusted asset holdings with narrative event-based identification reveals that purchases made for accommodation strongly affect yields, while purchases made for market functioning primarily enhance liquidity. We advance a partial equilibrium model of an intermediated bond market that can reconcile these findings. When trading flow is orderly, large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) operate through the expected supply of duration ...
Journal Article
How Many Reserves Does the Federal Reserve Need to Supply?
The level of reserves the Federal Reserve needs to supply depends on the spread between the federal funds rate and the IOR rate. If policymakers choose to operate with a near-zero federal funds-IOR spread, then reserve balances of $1.5 trillion may be required to implement monetary policy. However, if policymakers opt for a higher federal funds-IOR spread, then reserve balances of about $1.1 trillion may suffice.
Working Paper
Reconciling VAR-based Forecasts with Survey Forecasts
This paper proposes a novel Bayesian approach to jointly model realized data and survey forecasts of the same variable in a vector autoregression (VAR). In particular, our method imposes a prior distribution on the consistency between the forecast implied by the VAR and the survey forecast for the same variable. When the prior is placed on unconditional forecasts from the VAR, the prior shapes the posterior of the reduced-form VAR coefficients. When the prior is placed on conditional forecasts (specifically, impulse responses), the prior shapes the posterior of the structural VAR ...
Working Paper
House prices, heterogeneous banks and unconventional monetary policy options
This paper develops a nancial mechanism which integrates housing and the real econ- omy through housing-secured debt. In this environment, movements in home prices are ampli ed through both borrowers and banks' balance sheets, leading to a self-reinforcing credit/liquidity crunch. When placed within a traditional business cycle model, this - financial structure quantitatively captures empirical relationships the traditional nancial accelerator mechanism struggles to explain and the qualitative predictions of the model are consistent with dynamic responses from a VAR. The model provides a ...