Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

About: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is a other organization based out in Dallas, Texas, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 196 authors who have published 994 publications receiving 35508 citations.

Central Bank Communication Must Overcome the Public's Limited Attention Span

Abstract: It is critical that central bankers have the ability to communicate their monetary policy goals and intentions involving employment and price stability to the public. The task is complicated in an economy that includes many firms and households in an era of information overload.

Uncertainty Shocks in a Model of Effective Demand: Comment

Abstract: Basu and Bundick (2017) show a second moment intertemporal preference shock creates meaningful declines in output in a sticky price model with Epstein and Zin (1991) preferences. The result, however, rests on the way they model the shock. If a preference shock is included in Epstein-Zin preferences, the distributional weights on current and future utility must sum to 1, otherwise it creates an asymptote in the response to the shock with unit intertemporal elasticity of substitution. When we change the preferences so the weights sum to 1, the asymptote disappears as well as their main results—uncertainty shocks generate small increases in output and comovement with consumption and investment that is at odds with the data. We examine three changes to the model—recalibration, a risk-premium shock, and a disaster risk-type shock—to try and restore their results, but in all three cases the model is unable to match VAR evidence.

Distant Lending, Specialization, and Access to Credit

Abstract: Small business lending has historically been very local, but distances between small businesses and their lenders have steadily increased over the last forty years. This paper investigates a new lending strategy made possible by distant small business lending: industry specialization. Using data on all Small Business Administration 7(a) loans from 2001-2017, we document a substantial increase in remote, specialized small business lenders, i.e., lenders that originate many distant loans and concentrate these loans within a small number of industries. These lenders target low-risk industries and, consistent with expertise, experience better loan performance within these industries. We then examine whether this industry-specialized lending serves as a substitute or complement to traditional, geographically specialized lending. We exploit the staggered entry of a remote, specialized lender to estimate the impact of specialized lending on credit access. Entry significantly increases total lending, with no evidence of substitution away from other lenders. The results indicate that specialized lending can deepen credit markets by providing new loans to low-risk but underfinanced small businesses.

Ties that Bind: Estimating the Natural Rate of Interest for Small Open Economies

Abstract: This paper estimates the natural interest rate for six small open economies (Australia, Canada, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.) with a structural New Keynesian model using Bayesian techniques. Our empirical analysis establishes the following four novel findings. First, we show that the open-economy framework provides a better fit of the data than its closed-economy counterpart for the six countries we investigate. Second, we also show that, in all six countries, a monetary policy rule in which the domestic real policy rate tracks the Wicksellian domestic short-term natural rate of interest as an additional measure of real economic activity fits the data better than otherwise standard Taylor (1993) rules. Third, we show that over the past thirty-five years, the natural interest rates in all six countries have shifted downwards and strongly co-moved with each other. Fourth, our findings illustrate that foreign output shocks (spillovers from the rest of the world) are a major contributor to the dynamics of the natural interest rate in all six small open economies, and that natural rates in these countries co-move strongly with estimated U.S. natural rates.