Search Results
Working Paper
An Early Experiment with "Permazero"
We investigate a monetary regime with persistent, near-zero policy interest rates ("permazero" in the terminology of Bullard 2015). This regime was implemented in 1683 by a prominent early central bank called the Bank of Amsterdam ("Bank"). The Bank fixed its policy rate at one-half percent and held it unchanged for more than a century. Maintaining the rate helped stabilize the value of Bank money. We employ archival data to reconstruct the Bank's activities during a portion of that interval (1736-91) for which data are most readily available. The data suggest that "permazero" worked well for ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and SME Failures
We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures among small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in seventeen countries using a large representative firm-level database. We use a simple model of firm cost minimization and measure each firm’s liquidity shortfall during and after COVID-19. Our framework allows for a rich combination of sectoral and aggregate supply, productivity, and demand shocks. Accommodation and food services; arts, entertainment, and recreation; education; and other services are among the sectors most affected. The SME jobs at risk due to business ...
Working Paper
Business Formation: A Tale of Two Recessions
The trajectory of new business applications and transitions to employer businesses differ markedly during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 recession. Both applications and transitions to employer startups decreased slowly but persistently in the post-Lehman crisis period of the Great Recession. In contrast, during the COVID-19 recession new applications initially declined but have since sharply rebounded, resulting in a surge in applications during 2020. Projected transitions to employer businesses also rise, but this projection is dampened by a change in the composition of applications ...
Report
How Did the MSLP Borrowers Fare Before and During COVID-19?
This policy brief uses Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data to assess whether the Main Street Lending Program (MSLP) borrowers were in worse financial health than their peers before COVID-19 hit the economy hard in March 2020 or suffered worse deterioration afterward. The findings can help us better understand why these firms sought to obtain MSLP loans. We find that MSLP borrowers tend to be larger than their peer firms (that is, firms in the same industry and state). Within the same size group, MSLP borrowers are on average younger than their peers. Borrowers tended to have a slightly higher ...
Report
The Main Street Lending Program
The Main Street Lending Program was created to support credit to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were harmed by the pandemic, particularly those that were unsupported by other pandemic-response programs. It was the most direct involvement in the business loan market by the Federal Reserve since the 1930s and 1940s. Main Street operated by buying 95 percent participations in standardized loans from lenders (mostly banks) and sharing the credit risk with them. It would end up supporting loans to more than 2,400 borrowers and co-borrowers across the United ...
Report
Manufacturing Gains from Green Energy and Semiconductor Spending since the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts
Real investment—spending (net of inflation) on nonresidential construction, manufacturing equipment, and intellectual property products (IPP)—in the United States has grown substantially over the last few years despite the high-interest-rate environment that emerged in 2022 and is only now beginning to subside. The current strength of investment is important to policymakers because its sensitivity to interest rates makes it a key channel through which monetary policy is transmitted into the economy and because real private domestic investment constitutes 15 percent of US real GDP.
Report
The Impact of Tariffs on Inflation
This brief introduces a new methodology that quantifies how price increases at the border transmit to US consumers. The methodology allows the authors to determine the share of US consumption that would be subject to such increases and to break them down into different country and industry sources. Among other applications, the methodology enables the authors to compute the effects of various tariff plans on consumer price inflation, as tariffs effectively increase the border prices of imported goods.
Working Paper
Pass-Through Beyond the Border: Oligopoly, Networks, and Tariffs
We develop a multisector open-economy model that maps border price shocks into US producer and consumer prices through imported inputs, domestic production networks, and competition with foreign suppliers. The framework, which we apply to the 2025 US tariffs, accommodates pass-through in either levels or logs and maps directly to public data on input–output linkages, trade, and prices. Allowing firms to respond to the prices of competing imported varieties substantially improves the model’s fit to producer prices, and the resulting model is also consistent with the consumer-price ...
Working Paper
Government Banks and Interventions in Credit Markets
We study a large-scale quasi-experiment in the Brazilian banking sector characterized by an unexpected and macroeconomically relevant increase in lending by commercial government banks. Using credit registry data, we find that this intervention led to a reduction in lending rates, but it did not lead to a change in private banks’ credit supply. Firms reliant on government banks experienced a substantial increase in debt, and government banks faced a large increase in loan defaults driven by indebted firms. We find a small increase in employment at the firm level, suggesting limited direct ...
Working Paper
Export-Led Decay: The Trade Channel in the Gold Standard Era
Flexible exchange rates can facilitate price adjustments that buffer macroeconomic shocks. We test this hypothesis using adjustments to the gold standard during the Great Depression. Using prices at the goods level, we estimate exchange rate pass-through. Using novel monthly data on city-level economic activity, combined with employment composition and sectoral export data, we show that American exporting cities were significantly affected by changes in bilateral exchange rates. With those results we calibrate a general equilibrium model to obtain aggregate effects from cross-sectional ...