Search Results
Report
Stock Market Spillovers via the Global Production Network: Transmission of U.S. Monetary Policy
We quantify the role of global production linkages in explaining spillovers of U.S. monetary policy shocks to stock returns of fifty-four sectors in twenty-six countries. We first present a conceptual framework based on a standard open-economy production network model that delivers a spillover pattern consistent with a spatial autoregression (SAR) process. We then use the SAR model to decompose the overall impact of U.S. monetary policy on stock returns into a direct and a network effect. We find that up to 80 percent of the total impact of U.S. monetary policy shocks on average ...
Report
Financial Stability Considerations for Monetary Policy: Empirical Evidence and Challenges
This paper reviews literature on the empirical relationship between vulnerabilities in the financial system and the macroeconomy, and how monetary policy affects that connection. Financial vulnerabilities build up over time, with both risk appetite and risk taking rising during economic expansions. To some extent, financial crises are predictable and have severe real economic consequences when they occur. Empirically it is difficult to link monetary policy to financial vulnerabilities, in part because financial cycles have long durations, making it difficult to separate effects of changes in ...
Working Paper
Wealth Inequality and Return Heterogeneity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Wealth inequality in the U.S., measured by the top 1% wealth share, experienced dramatic changes in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Economic theory suggests that the key to understanding wealth inequality is heterogeneity in the return to net worth across households. To understand the dynamics of wealth inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop a novel methodology that allows us to estimate the returns to net worth for different groups of households at relatively high frequency. We show that portfolio heterogeneity and asset price movements are the main determinants of ...
Discussion Paper
The International Spillover of U.S. Monetary Policy via Global Production Linkages
The recent era of globalization has witnessed growing cross-country trade integration as firms’ production chains have spread across the world, and with stock market returns becoming more correlated across countries. While research has predominantly focused on how financial integration impacts the propagation of shocks across international financial markets, trade also influences these cross-border spillovers. In particular, one important aspect, highlighted by the recent work of di Giovanni and Hale (2020), is how the global production network influences the transmission of U.S. monetary ...
Report
The Bitcoin–Macro Disconnect
This paper investigates the link between Bitcoin and macroeconomic fundamentals by estimating the impact of macroeconomic news on Bitcoin using an event study with intraday data. The key result is that, unlike other U.S. asset classes, Bitcoin is orthogonal to monetary and macroeconomic news. This disconnect is puzzling as unexpected changes in discount rates should, in principle, affect the price of Bitcoin even when interpreting Bitcoin as a purely speculative asset.
Discussion Paper
How Unconventional Are Large-Scale Asset Purchases?
The large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) undertaken by the Fed starting in late November 2008 are widely considered to be a form of ?unconventional? monetary policy. Although these interventions are certainly unprecedented, this post shows that their effect on financial conditions is not that unconventional, in the sense that the relative effects of the LSAPs on returns across broad asset classes?nominal and real government bonds, stocks, and foreign exchange?are quite similar to those of more conventional policies, such as a reduction in the federal funds rate (FFR).
Working Paper
The Transmission of the Financial Crisis in 1907: An Empirical Investigation
Using an extensive high-frequency data set, we investigate the transmission of financial crisis specifically focusing on the Panic of 1907, the final severe panic of the National Banking Era (1863-1913). We trace the transmission of the crisis from New York City trust companies to the New York City national banks through direct and indirect interconnections. Trust companies held cash balances at national banks, and these balances were liquidated as trust companies suffered depositor runs. Secondly, trust companies and national banks were notable creditors to the New York Stock Exchange; when ...
Report
Asset price effects of peer benchmarking: evidence from a natural experiment
We estimate the effects of peer benchmarking by institutional investors on asset prices. To identify trades purely due to peer benchmarking as separate from those based on fundamentals or private information, we exploit a natural experiment involving a change in a government-imposed underperformance penalty applicable to Colombian pension funds. This change in regulation is orthogonal to stock fundamentals and only affects incentives to track peer portfolios, allowing us to identify the component of demand that is caused by peer benchmarking. We find that these peer effects generate excess ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy through production networks: evidence from the stock market
Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on stock prices during narrow time windows centered around press releases by the FOMC. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and a network effect. We attribute 50 to 85 percent of the overall impact to network effects. The decomposition is a robust feature of the data, and we confirm large network effects in realized cash-flow fundamentals. A simple model with intermediate inputs allows a structural interpretation of our empirical strategy. Our findings indicate that production ...
Discussion Paper
What’s News?
Economic news moves markets. Most analyses find that economic news is incorporated quickly (within minutes) into asset prices, with some measurable persistence of these effects, and with some spillovers across national borders. Some types of announcements—for example, U.S. nonfarm payrolls announcements—generate much larger asset price responses than others. Generally, news that is more timely, is more precise (being subject to smaller revisions on average), and contains more information (being better able to better forecast GDP growth, inflation, or central bank policy decisions) has a ...