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Discussion Paper
Are Rising U.S. Interest Rates Destabilizing for Emerging Market Economies?
Rising U.S. interest rates are often thought to be bad news for emerging market economies (EMEs) as they increase debt burdens, trigger capital outflows, and generally cause a tightening of financial conditions that can lead to financial crises. Indeed, as shown in Figure 1 below, the rise in the federal funds rate (the black line) during the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s was associated with a sharp rise in the incidence of financial crises in EMEs (the green bars).
Working Paper
Financial Stress and Equilibrium Dynamics in Money Markets
Interest rate spreads are widely-used indicators of funding pressures and market functioning in money markets. Using weekly data from 2002 to 2015, we analyze money market dynamics in a long-run equilibrium framework where commonly-monitored spreads serve as error correction terms. We find strong evidence for nonlinearities with respect to levels of the spreads. We provide point and interval estimates for spread thresholds that quantify funding pressure points from a long-run perspective. Our results indicate significant asymmetry in the adjustment toward long-run equilibrium. We show that ...
Discussion Paper
Monetary Policy and Exchange Rates during the Global Tightening
Most central banks tightened monetary policy considerably over the past few years as inflation surged globally. Though effects of the COVID pandemic on global supply chains and labor markets was a common factor driving inflation higher across economies, domestic factors led to notable variation in the timing and extent of monetary policy responses.
Working Paper
Government debt and macroeconomic activity: a predictive analysis for advanced economies
This paper explores the empirical relationship between government debt and future macroeconomic activity using data on twenty advanced economies throughout the post-war era. We use robust inference techniques to deal with the bias arising from the persistent nature of debt to GDP ratio as an endogenous predictor of GDP growth. Our results show that statistical significance of the coefficient on the debt ratio in predictive regressions changes considerably with the use of robust inference techniques. For countries with relatively low average debt ratios we find a negative threshold effect as ...
Working Paper
What does financial volatility tell us about macroeconomic fluctuations?
This paper provides an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility measures for economic activity. We construct monthly measures of stock and bond market volatility from daily returns and model volatility as composed of a long-run component that is common across all series, and a set of idiosyncratic short-run components. Based on powerful in-sample predictive ability tests, we find that the stock volatility measures and the common factor significantly improve short-term forecasts of conventional financial indicators. A real-time out of sample assessment yields a ...
Discussion Paper
Dynamics of Overnight Money Markets: What Has Changed at the Zero Lower Bound?
In this note we provide a comparative analysis of overnight money market dynamics before the crisis and after the target federal funds rate (FFR) has been lowered to the zero lower bound (ZLB).
Discussion Paper
The Impact of COVID-19 on Emerging Market Economies' Financial Conditions
The emerging market economies (EMEs) – and the lower-income developing economies to an even greater extent – generally are extremely vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many EMEs have weak public health systems, poor and financially vulnerable populations, inadequate social safety nets, limited monetary and especially fiscal policy space, and high exposure to global trade and commodity prices.
Working Paper
What does financial volatility tell us about macroeconomic fluctuations?
This paper provides an extensive analysis of the predictive ability of financial volatility measures for economic activity. We construct monthly measures of aggregated and industry-level stock volatility, and bond market volatility from daily returns. We model log financial volatility as composed of a long-run component that is common across all series, and a short-run component. If volatility has components, volatility proxies are characterized by large measurement error, which veils analysis of their fundamental information and relationship with the economy. We find that there are ...
Discussion Paper
Drivers of Inflation Compensation: Evidence from Inflation Swaps in Advanced Economies
In this note, we provide a comparative analysis of inflation swaps for three advanced economies: the United States, the euro area, and the United Kingdom. We consider empirical proxies for energy prices, economic activity, exchange rates, and risky asset prices as potential drivers of inflation expectations and risk premiums in a regression framework.