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Bank:Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis  Content Type:Working Paper 

Working Paper
Optimal Asset Market Operations

We characterize governments' optimal responses to asset market disturbances across a broad class of models with financial frictions. We show that the Ramsey plan can be achieved by a policy rule targeting a specific relationship between asset returns, regardless of the underlying disturbances. This relationship is determined by asset supply and demand elasticities that can be estimated empirically with standard identification strategies. Absent financial frictions, the optimal policy stabilizes spreads across all assets. However, in the presence of financial frictions, the optimal rule ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-014

Working Paper
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries

We quantify the labor market barriers that immigrants face, using an occupational choice model with natives and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., representing 25% of immigrants' overall economic contribution, and that these wedges alter the impact of alternative immigration policies. We harmonize microdata across 19 economies and exploit cross-country variation in immigrant outcomes and estimated wedges to examine the drivers of differences in wedges and gains from their ...
Working Papers , Paper 2021-004

Working Paper
Policy Rules and Large Crises in Emerging Markets

Emerging economies have adopted fiscal and monetary rules to discipline government policy. We study the value and macroeconomic implications of rules and flexibility within a sovereign-default model that incorporates domestic fiscal and monetary policies and long-term external debt. Adopting monetary targets and debt limits during normal times yields welfare gains. Suspending rules can significantly influence policy, macroeconomic outcomes, and welfare during large, unforeseen crises. The gains from flexibility depend on how quickly policymakers are able to reimpose rules after the crisis.
Working Papers , Paper 2022-018

Working Paper
The Cost of Capital and Misallocation in the United States

We develop a methodology to estimate the cost of capital using credit registry microdata, and apply it to study capital allocation efficiency in the United States. Our measure incorporates the contractual interest rate, expected default probability, recovery rate, and expectations of future rates. We estimate three distinct rates: (i) the lender's discount rate, (ii) the firm's cost of capital, and (iii) the social cost of capital. We derive a sufficient statistic for misallocation based on the first and second moments of the social cost of capital. Dispersion in this rate captures both ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-013

Working Paper
Fed-Driven Systemic Tail Risk: High-Frequency Measurement, Evidence and Implications

We develop a framework to measure market-wide (systemic) tail risk in the cross-section of asset returns. Using high-frequency data on individual U.S. stocks and sector-specific ETF portfolios, we estimate time-varying jump intensities and multi-asset tail risk around Fed policy announcements. While most FOMC announcements generate systemic left-tail risk, there is no evidence that macro announcements have a similar effect. The magnitude of the tail risk induced by Fed policy announcements varies over the business cycle, peaks during the global financial crisis and remains high during phases ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-016

Working Paper
On the Transition to Sustained Growth: The Importance of Recent Agricultural Employment

We study a model where a single good can be produced using a diminishing-returns technology (Malthus) and a constant-returns technology (Solow). We map the former to agriculture and show that the share of agricultural employment declines at a constant rate during the economic transition and that recent observations on the share are sufficient to estimate the onset of transition. Our model implies that (i) output growth is higher and increasing after the onset of transition, (ii) during the transition, it is a first-order autoregressive process, and (iii) the rate of decline in the share of ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-026

Working Paper
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Job Displacement: Evidence from Canadian Job Separation Records

When estimating earnings losses upon job separations, existing strategies focus on separations in mass layoffs to distinguish involuntary separations from voluntary separations. We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of involuntary separations using Canadian job separation records. We refine existing strategies and find that only a quarter of mass-layoff separations are indeed layoffs. We provide guidance on how to effectively filter out spurious separations when using databases with sparse information on separations. Isolating involuntary mass-layoff separations with our ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-022

Working Paper
The Phillips Curve's and Relative Phillips Curve's Slopes: Why So Different?

I estimate the effect of labor market tightness on wage inflation from 2004-2019 using aggregate data and a hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve. The Phillips curve slope, i.e., the effect of a unit increase in the vacancy-unemployment ratio on inflation, is about 3.4 percentage points. Then, I estimate the model using the corresponding panel-level data with a time-fixed-effect regression: The resulting regional (i.e., relative) Phillips curve slope is about 0.7. This large difference between the two slopes is robust to controlling for various measures of inflation expectations and for supply ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-010

Working Paper
Extended Supplement to “Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information”

This supplement contains auxiliary technical results and proofs omitted from Bloedel, Krishna, and Leukhina (2025) (henceforth BKL) and its Supplemental Appendix (henceforth SA). First, Section I proves parts (a)–(c) and (e)–(f) of Theorem 3 from Appendix B.1 of BKL. (Part (d) of Theorem 3 is proved in SA-E.1 of BKL.) Second, Section J proves Proposition 3.2 from Section 3.3 of BKL and Lemma B.2 from Appendix B.2 of BKL. Finally, Section K proves supporting facts for Properties (a)–(e) from Section 5.2 of BKL. Throughout, we follow the numbering and labeling conventions from BKL and its ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-012

Working Paper
Monetary Policy and the Great COVID-19 Price Level Shock

We use an analytically tractable DSGE model to study the surge in the cost of living in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A calibrated version of the model is used to assess the conduct of US monetary and fiscal policy over the 2020-2024 period. The model is also used to estimate the economic and welfare consequences of alternative monetary and fiscal policies. The calibrated model suggests that while the extraordinary fiscal transfers made in 2020-21 generally improved economic welfare, they were significantly larger than needed. These welfare gains came primarily in the form of insurance, ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-004

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