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Journal Article
Have Lags in Monetary Policy Transmission Shortened?
The Federal Open Market Committee’s monetary policy has expanded beyond changing the federal funds rate to include forward guidance and balance sheet policy. Using these tools may shorten lags in monetary policy transmitting to inflation. Using a proxy funds rate that incorporates tightening from these additional policy tools, we find evidence of a shorter lag in policy transmission to inflation since 2009, though with high associated uncertainty.
Working Paper
Assessing Macroeconomic Tail Risks in a Data-Rich Environment
We use a large set of economic and financial indicators to assess tail risks of the three macroeconomic variables: real GDP, unemployment, and inflation. When applied to U.S. data, we find evidence that a dense model using principal components (PC) as predictors might be misspecified by imposing the “common slope” assumption on the set of predictors across multiple quantiles. The common slope assumption ignores the heterogeneous informativeness of individual predictors on different quantiles. However, the parsimony of the PC-based approach improves the accuracy of out-of-sample forecasts ...
Journal Article
Has the effect of monetary policy announcements on asset prices changed?
The Federal Reserve increasingly has relied on forward guidance about the future path of the federal funds rate to implement monetary policy since the federal funds target rate reached its effective lower bound. The enhanced use of forward policy guidance has drawn attention to any change in its influence on the real economy. Changes in policy guidance affect the private sector?s expectations about the future path of the federal funds rate and, in turn, affect bond yields, stock prices and asset values. Changes in asset values influence real activity through their effects on spending by ...
Journal Article
Revamping the Kansas City Financial Stress Index Using the Treasury Repo Rate
The Kansas City Financial Stress Index (KCFSI) uses the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) to measure money market borrowing conditions. But regulatory changes in the United Kingdom will eliminate LIBOR by 2021. We construct a revised financial stress index with a variable that measures the cost of borrowing collateralized by Treasury securities (the Treasury repo rate) instead of LIBOR. {{p}} This revised measure of the KCFSI is highly correlated with the current KCFSI, suggesting the Treasury repo rate can replace LIBOR.
Journal Article
Monetary Policy Stance Is Tighter than Federal Funds Rate
The Federal Reserve’s use of forward guidance and balance sheet policy means that monetary policy consists of more than changing the federal funds rate target. A proxy federal funds rate that incorporates data from financial markets can help assess the broader stance of monetary policy. This proxy measure shows that, since late 2021, monetary policy has been substantially tighter than the federal funds rate indicates. Tightening financial conditions are similar to what would be expected if the funds rate had exceeded 5¼% by September 2022.
Working Paper
Long run risks in the term structure of interest rates: estimation
This paper specifies and estimates a long run risks model with inflation by using the nominal term structure data in the United States from 1953 to 2006. The negative correlation between expected inflation and expected consumption growth in conjunction with the Epstein-Zin (1989) recursive preferences generates an upward sloping yield curve and fits the yield curve data better than the alternative specifications. However, the variations of the forward looking components of consumption growth and inflation in the estimated model are much smaller than implied by calibrated parameter values in ...
Working Paper
What does the yield curve tell us about the Federal Reserve's implicit inflation target?
This paper studies the time variation of the Federal Reserve?s inflation target between 1960 and 2004 using both macro and yield curve data. I estimate a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which the inflation target follows a random-walk process. I compare estimation results obtained from both macroeconomic and yield curve data, two estimates obtained with only macro data, in order to determine what the yield curve tells us about the inflation target. In the joint estimation, the estimated inflation target is much higher during the mid 1980s than in the ...
Working Paper
Shocks, Frictions, and Policy Regimes: Understanding Inflation after the COVID-19 Pandemic
We set- up a two-sector New Keynesian model with input-output linkages to study the persistently high inflation during the post-COVID-19 period. We include multiple shocks as well as several amplification channels of these shocks in a parsimonious model to quantify the relative importance of each factor. We calibrate the model to match the pre-COVID-19 data and alter parameters governing 1) the fiscal rule, 2) inflation feedback in the monetary policy rule, 3) elasticity of substitution among intermediary inputs in production, and 4) the size of a sectoral demand shift shock to explain the ...
Journal Article
Changing Credit Profile of Consumers: Aging Versus the Business Cycle
The average consumer credit score reached a record high recently. While some commentators attributed this development to the cyclical rebound from the Great Recession, I find that the changing age distribution of credit applicants also played a significant role. Changes in demographics alone can explain 43 percent of the increase in the average score from 1999:Q1 to 2017:Q2.