Search Results
Working Paper
News-driven uncertainty fluctuations
We embed a news shock, a noisy indicator of the future state, in a two-state Markov-switching growth model. Our framework, combined with parameter learning, features rich history-dependent uncertainty dynamics. We show that bad news that arrives during a prolonged economic boom can trigger a ?Minsky moment??a sudden collapse in asset values. The effect is greatly amplified when agents have a preference for early resolution of uncertainty. We leverage survey recession probability forecasts to solve a sequential learning problem and estimate the full posterior distribution of model primitives. ...
Working Paper
Explaining the Great Moderation Exchange Rate Volatility Puzzle
In this paper, we study how the volatility of both realized and expected macroeconomic variables relates to the variation in exchange rate volatility through the prism of the Great Moderation hypothesis. We find significant heterogeneity in exchange rate trend volatility across currency pairs despite decreases in the volatility of expected future interest rate differentials and of realized yields themselves. We argue that time variation in the relationship between macroeconomic variables and exchange rates has prevented the Great Moderation in realized yield volatility from translating to a ...
Working Paper
A Fundamental Connection: Exchange Rates and Macroeconomic Expectations
This paper presents new stylized facts about exchange rates and their relationship with macroeconomic fundamentals. We show that macroeconomic surprises explain a large majority of the variation in nominal exchange rate changes at a quarterly frequency. Using a novel present value decomposition of exchange rate changes that is disciplined with survey forecast data, we show that macroeconomic surprises are also a very important driver of the currency risk premium component and explain about half of its variation. These surprises have even greater explanatory power during economic downturns and ...
Working Paper
Inflation Thresholds and Inattention
Inflation expectations are key to economic activity, and in the current economic climate of a heated labor market, they are central to the policy debate. At the same time, a growing literature on inattention suggests that individuals, and therefore individual behavior, may not be sensitive to changes in inflation when it is low. This paper explores evidence of such inattention by constructing three different measures based on the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers 1-year ahead inflation expectations. Exploring inflation thresholds of 2, 3, and 4 percent, our findings are ...
Working Paper
How Robust Are Makeup Strategies to Key Alternative Assumptions?
We analyze the robustness of makeup strategies—policies that aim to offset, at least in part, past misses of inflation from its objective—to alternative modeling assumptions, with an emphasis on the role of inflation expectations. We survey empirical evidence on the behavior of shorter-run and long-run inflation expectations. Using simulations from the FRB/US macroeconomic model, we find that makeup strategies can moderately offset the real effects of adverse economic shocks, even when much of the public is uninformed about the monetary strategy. We also discuss the robustness of makeup ...
Policy impact of unexpected Fed rate movements blurred by key information cues
Unexpected Federal Reserve monetary policy moves can profoundly affect market participants, investors and the economy. The impact of policy stems not only from its direct effects—the traditional focus for economists—but also from the new information revealed about the Fed’s economic outlook.
Report
The Roles of Mobility and Masks in the Spread of COVID-19
This policy brief analyzes the effects of COVID-19 mitigation policies, those that restrict movement and activity and those that advocate public health best practices. The analysis uses US state-level data to estimate the effects of mobility, mask mandates, and compliance with these mandates on the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths. A one-standard-deviation increase in mobility is associated with an 11 to 20 basis points greater rate of growth in case counts; a mask mandate can offset about half of this increase. Slower growth in case counts ultimately translates into slower growth in ...
Working Paper
FOMC communication and interest rate sensitivity to news
In this paper, I examine whether communications by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) play a role in determining the types of macroeconomic news that financial markets pay attention to. To do so, I construct novel measures of the intensity with which FOMC statements and meeting minutes discussed labor relative to other topics. I find that these labor topic intensity measures are related to the amount by which interest rates? response to labor-related news exceeds their response to all other news. This relationship is especially strong for interest rates of longer maturities and is also ...
Working Paper
Tariff passthrough at the border and at the store: evidence from US trade policy
We use micro data collected at the border and at retailers to characterize the effects brought by recent changes in US trade policy ? particularly the tariffs placed on imports from China ? on importers, consumers, and exporters. We start by documenting that the tariffs were almost fully passed through to the total prices paid by importers, suggesting that the tariffs? incidence has fallen largely on the United States. Since we estimate the response of prices to exchange rates to be far more muted, the recent depreciation of the Chinese renminbi is unlikely to alter this conclusion. Next, ...
Working Paper
Interest Rate Surprises: A Tale of Two Shocks
Interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements reveal both the surprise in the monetary policy stance (the pure policy shock) and interest rate movements driven by exogenous information about the economy from the central bank (the information shock). In order to disentangle the effects of these two shocks, we use interest rate changes on days of macroeconomic data releases. On these release dates, there are no pure policy shocks, which allows us to identify the impact of information shocks and thereby distill pure policy shocks from interest rate surprises around FOMC announcements. Our ...