Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

About: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is a other organization based out in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Payment. The organization has 184 authors who have published 878 publications receiving 36686 citations. The organization is also known as: Boston Fed.

Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially

Abstract: This paper examines image motivation - the desire to be liked and well-regarded by others - as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image motivation.By definition, image depends on one's behavior being visible to other people. Using this unique property we show that image is indeed an important part of the motivation to behave prosocially. Moreover, we show that extrinsic incentives interact with image motivation and are therefore less effective in public than in private. Together, these results imply that image motivation is crowded out by monetary incentives; this means that monetary incentives are more likely to be counterproductive for public prosocial activities than for private ones.

Habit Formation in Consumption and Its Implications for Monetary Policy Models

Abstract: This paper explores a monetary policy model with habit formation for consumers, in which consumers’ utility depends in part on current consumption relative to past consumption The empirical tests developed in the paper show that one can reject the hypothesis of no habit formation with tremendous condence, largely because the habit formation model captures the gradual hump-shaped response of real spending to various shocks The paper then embeds the habit consumption specication in a monetary policy model and nds that the responses of both spending and inflation to monetary policy actions are signicantly improved by this modication (JEL D12, E52, E43)

Collateral Damage: Effects of the Japanese Bank Crisis on Real Activity in the United States

Abstract: The Japanese banking crisis provides a natural experiment to test whether a loan supply shock can affect real economic activity. Because the shock was external to U.S. credit markets, yet connected through the Japanese bank penetration of U.S. markets, this event allows us to identify an exogenous loan supply shock and ultimately link that shock to construction activity in U.S. commercial real estate markets. We exploit the variation across geographically distinct commercial real estate markets to establish conclusively that loan supply shocks emanating from Japan had real effects on economic activity in the United States. (JEL E44, F36)

Policy Watch: Infrastructure Investment and Economic Growth

Abstract: In the late 1980s, David Aschauer (1989) triggered a long overdue dialogue among economists and political leaders when he published a study arguing that much of the decline in U.S. productivity that occurred in the 1970s was precipitated by declining rates of public capital investment. My own work confirmed these results (Munnell, 1990a). Spending advocates seized on these findings as support for increased public investment. The enthusiasm among policymakers for the early Aschauer results was matched, if not surpassed, by skepticism on the part of many economists. Critics of these studies charged that the methodology was flawed, that the direction of causation between public investment and output growth is unclear and that, even if the historical empirical relationships were estimated correctly, they provide no clear indications for current policy. Who's right? What do we know and not know about the link between public infrastructure and productivity? And what are the implications of these results for policy?

The International Transmission of Financial Shocks: The Case of Japan

Abstract: The large size of Japanese bank lending operations in the United States enables us to use U.S. banking data to investigate the extent to which the sharp decline in Japanese stock prices was transmitted to the United States via U.S. branches of Japanese parent banks, as well as to identify a supply shock to U.S. bank lending that is independent of U.S. loan demand. We find that binding risk-based capital requirements associated with the decline in the Japanese stock market resulted in a decline in commercial lending by Japanese banks in the United States that was both economically and statistically significant.