Search Results
Working Paper
The cyclicality of (bilateral) capital inflows and outflows
Recent research has shown that gross capital inflows and outflows are positively correlated and highly procyclical. This poses a puzzle since most theory predicts that capital inflows and outflows should be negatively correlated, and while capital inflows should be procyclical, capital outflows should be countercyclical. This previous work has examined the behavior of aggregate capital inflows and outflows (capital flows between a country and the rest of the world). This paper shows that bilateral capital inflows and outflows (flows between a pair of countries) are also positively correlated ...
Working Paper
Taxes and the Fed : Theory and Evidence from Equities
We provide a critical theoretical and empirical analysis that suggests a key driver of fiscal effects on equity markets is the Federal Reserve. For the Post-1980 era, tax cuts lead to higher cash flow news and higher discount rates. The discount rate news tends to dominate such that tax cuts are associated with lower equity returns. This result is flipped for the Pre-1980 era. Our results are confirmed across multiple measures of tax shocks (narrative, SVAR, municipal bonds, etc.) at different frequencies (daily, quarterly, annual). We motivate our empirical findings with a standard New ...
Journal Article
The Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility
To bolster the effectiveness of the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the Federal Reserve, with the backing of the Secretary of the Treasury, established the Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility (PPPLF). The facility was intended to supply liquidity to financial institutions participating in the PPP and thereby provide relief to small businesses and help them maintain payroll. In this article, the author lays out the background and rationale for the creation of the facility, covers the salient features of the PPP and the PPPLF, and analyzes the ...
Discussion Paper
The Emergence of Tokenized Investment Funds and Their Use Cases
A blockchain is a distributed database where independent computers across the world maintain identical copies of a transaction record, updating it only when the network reaches consensus on new transactions—making the history transparent and extraordinarily difficult to alter. Historically, bonds have traded almost entirely in over-the-counter (OTC) markets, while equities and money market fund shares have largely settled through centralized infrastructures such as stock exchanges and central securities depositories. In both settings, each institution maintains its own records, and ...
Discussion Paper
The Financial Stability Implications of Tokenized Investment Funds
In a previous post, we provided background information about the emergence of tokenized investment funds and their use cases. These use cases are currently limited to the digital asset ecosystem. However, the recent approval of cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the passage of the GENIUS Act raise concerns about the impact of these tokenized investment fund to the broader financial system. In this post, we assess this impact by considering three economic mechanisms based in part on market participants’ investment strategies and liquidity needs. They include: liquidity ...
Discussion Paper
New York Fed EHIs Reveal Small Business Struggles
The New York Fed’s Economic Heterogeneity Indicators (EHIs) aim to study macroeconomic outcomes experienced by various groups of people and businesses. We recently added a suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses to the EHIs—both for the region (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and nationally. Small businesses are critical to employment generation as they accounted for almost 63 percent of new private sector jobs since 2005 and employed almost 46 percent of all U.S. workers in 2025. Thus, understanding economic ...
Discussion Paper
Struggling Regional Small Businesses Deeply Pessimistic About 2026 Prospects
We recently updated the suite of indicators describing the performance of small businesses in the Second District (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and nationally with data from the 2025 edition of the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS). In this post, we find that regional small businesses reported severe declines in employment and revenue growth in 2025 and became more pessimistic about growth in 2026. In contrast, small firms in the rest of the nation enjoyed stable revenues and employment in 2025 and, while they also had lower expectations ...
Discussion Paper
Effect of Tariffs on U.S. Small Businesses
How has the recent implementation of tariffs affected small businesses? Due to lack of data, little is known about this issue. In this Liberty Street Economics post, we use data from the 2025 edition of the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS) to explore this question for businesses nationally and in the Second District (defined, for the purpose of this study, as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut). We find that the majority of national firms in the goods and retail sectors reported experiencing financial challenges due to tariffs in 2025, with even larger shares of regional firms doing so. ...
Discussion Paper
Selection in Banking
Over the past thirty years, more than 2,900 U.S. banks have transformed from pure depository institutions into conglomerates involved in a broad range of business activities. What type of banks choose to become conglomerate organizations? In this post, we document that, from 1986 to 2018, such institutions had, on average, a higher return on equity in the three years prior to their decision to expand, as well as a lower level of risk overall. However, this superior pre-expansion performance diminishes over time, and all but disappears by the end of the 1990s.
Discussion Paper
Banking System Vulnerability: Annual Update
A key part of understanding the stability of the U.S. financial system is to monitor leverage and funding risks in the financial sector and the way in which these vulnerabilities interact to amplify negative shocks. In this post, we provide an update of four analytical models, introduced in a Liberty Street Economics post last year, that aim to capture different aspects of banking system vulnerability. Since their introduction, vulnerabilities as indicated by these models have increased moderately, continuing the slow but steady upward trend that started around 2016. Despite the recent ...