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Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies
This paper explores the direct effects and spillovers of unconventional monetary and exchange rate policies. We find that official purchases of foreign assets have a large positive effect on a country's current account that diminishes considerably as capital mobility rises. There is an important additional effect through the lagged stock of official assets. Official purchases of domestic assets, or quantitative easing (QE), appear to have no significant effect on a country's current account when capital mobility is high, but there is a modest positive impact when capital mobility is low. The ...
Discussion Paper
Global Inflation Uncertainty and its Economic Effects
Policymakers, including Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) participants, have been stressing the elevated level of uncertainty, especially related to inflation, and the challenge this poses for monetary policy. As seen in Figure 1, with few exceptions, FOMC participants see the level of uncertainty around their forecasts for core PCE inflation as high, compared to the average over the past 20 years.
Working Paper
US Equity Tail Risk and Currency Risk Premia
We find that a US equity tail risk factor constructed from out-of-the-money S&P 500 put option prices explains the cross-sectional variation of currency excess returns. Currencies highly exposed to this factor offer a low currency risk premium because they appreciate when US tail risk increases. In a reduced-form model, we show that country-specific tail risk factors are priced in the cross section of currency returns only if they contain a global risk component. Motivated by the intuition from the model and by our empirical results, we construct a novel proxy for a global tail risk factor by ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding Global Volatility
In this note, we identify a global component of equity option-implied volatilities and address two questions: What are its fundamental drivers? And, given these drivers, are recent levels of volatility unexpectedly low?
Discussion Paper
Global Inflation Uncertainty and its Economic Effects
Policymakers, including Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) participants, have been stressing the elevated level of uncertainty, especially related to inflation, and the challenge this poses for monetary policy. As seen in Figure 1, with few exceptions, FOMC participants see the level of uncertainty around their forecasts for core PCE inflation as high, compared to the average over the past 20 years.
Discussion Paper
2nd Annual International Roles of the U.S. Dollar Conference
The U.S. dollar plays a central role in the global economy. In addition to being the most widely used currency in foreign exchange transactions, it represents the largest share in official reserves, international debt securities and loans, cross-border payments, and trade invoicing.
Working Paper
Sentiment in Central Banks' Financial Stability Reports
Using the text of financial stability reports (FSRs) published by central banks, we analyze the relation between the financial cycle and the sentiment conveyed in these official communications. To do so, we construct a dictionary tailored specifically to a financial stability context, which assigns positive and negative connotations based on the sentiment conveyed by words in FSRs. With this dictionary, we construct a financial stability sentiment (FSS) index. Using a panel of 35 countries for the sample period between 2005 and 2015, we find that central banks' FSS indexes are mostly driven ...
Discussion Paper
The Third SNB-FRB-BIS High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility: Monetary Policy and Banking Regulation under Elevated Uncertainty
The Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) jointly organized the third High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility on November 14 and 15 of 2023. The conference brought academics and policymakers together to discuss the many sources of risk and uncertainty under which monetary policymakers and bank regulators operate, recent advances in measuring the multi-faceted nature of uncertainty, and how policymakers respond to these challenges.
Working Paper
The Price of Macroeconomic Uncertainty: Evidence from Daily Options
Using recently available daily S&P 500 index option expirations, we examine the ex ante pricing of uncertainty surrounding key economic releases and the determinants of risk premia associated with these releases. The cost of insurance against price, variance, and downside risk is higher for options that span U.S. CPI, FOMC, Nonfarm Payroll, and GDP releases compared to neighboring expirations. We calculate release-driven forward equity and variance risk premia and find that premia vary considerably across economic releases and increase with risk aversion as well as with monetary policy and ...
Discussion Paper
The Third SNB-FRB-BIS High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility: Monetary Policy and Banking Regulation under Elevated Uncertainty
The Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) jointly organized the third High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility on November 14 and 15 of 2023. The conference brought academics and policymakers together to discuss the many sources of risk and uncertainty under which monetary policymakers and bank regulators operate, recent advances in measuring the multi-faceted nature of uncertainty, and how policymakers respond to these challenges.