Federal Reserve System

About: Federal Reserve System is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 2373 authors who have published 10301 publications receiving 511979 citations.

Regulatory Evaluation of Value-at-Risk Models

Abstract: Beginning in 1998, U.S. commercial banks may determine their regulatory capital requirements for financial market risk exposure using value-at-risk (VaR) models. Currently, regulators have available three hypothesis-testing methods for evaluating the accuracy of VaR models: the binomial, interval forecast and distribution forecast methods. Given the low power often exhibited by their corresponding hypothesis tests, these methods can often misclassify forecasts from inaccurate models as acceptably accurate. An alternative evaluation method using loss functions based on probability forecasts is proposed. Simulation results indicate that this method is only as capable of differentiating between forecasts from accurate and inaccurate models as the other methods. However, its ability to directly incorporate regulatory loss functions into model evaluations make it a useful complement to the current regulatory evaluation of VaR models.

Identifying the Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks on Exchange Rates Using High Frequency Data

Abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy decision on e nancial variables, such as the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate. We show how this information can be used to achieve identie cation without having to make the usual strong assumption of a recursive ordering. (JEL: C32, E52, F30)

Can financial innovation help to explain the reduced volatility of economic activity

Abstract: The stabilization of economic activity in the mid 1980s has received considerable attention. Research has focused primarily on the role played by milder economic shocks, improved inventory management, and better monetary policy. This paper explores another potential explanation: financial innovation. Examples of such innovation include developments in lending practices and loan markets that have enhanced the ability of households and firms to borrow and changes in government policy such as the demise of Regulation Q. We employ a variety of simple empirical techniques to identify links between the observed moderation in economic activity and the influence of financial innovation on consumer spending, housing investment, and business fixed investment. Our results suggest that financial innovation should be added to the list of likely contributors to the mid-1980s stabilization.

Education and income of the states of the United States: 1840–2000

Abstract: This article introduces original annual average years of schooling measures for each state from 1840 to 2000. Our methodology results in state estimates similar to those reported in the United States Census from 2000 back to 1940 and national, turn of the century estimates strikingly close to those presented by Schultz (Schultz, T. (1961). In N. B. Henry (Ed.), Social forces influencing American education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.) and Fishlow (Fishlow, A. (1966). In H. Rosovsky (Ed.), Industrialization in two systems. John Wiley & Sons). To further determine the validity of our state schooling estimates, we first combine original data on real state per worker output with existing data to provide a more comprehensive series of real state output per worker from 1840 to 2000. We then estimate aggregate Mincerian earnings regressions and discover that the return to a year of schooling for the average individual in a state ranges from 11% to 15%. This range is robust to various time periods, various estimation methods, various assumptions about the endogeneity of schooling and is in line with the body of evidence from the labor literature.

Market- vs. Bank-Based Financial Systems: Do Rights and Regulations Really Matter?

Abstract: Why are common-law countries market-dominated and civil-law countries bank-dominated? This paper provides an explanation tied to legal traditions. Civil-law courts have been less effective in resolving conflicts than common-law courts because civil-law judges traditionally refrain from interpreting the codes and creating new rules. Therefore, they are not very effective in extending their reach to matters that are not defined in the laws of the country. In a civil-law environment, where potential conflicts between borrowers and individual lenders inhibit the development of markets because the courts are unable to penalize defrauding borrowers, I show that banks can induce borrowers to honor their obligations by threatening to withhold services that only banks can provide. In other words, banks emerge as the primary contract enforcers in economies where courts are imperfect. Therefore, one would expect the civil-law countries to be bank-dominated. The empirical evidence presented in this paper supports this argument. Legal scholars argue that courts, acting as contract enforcers, need the guidance of laws to settle disputes. However, if there are alternative institutions in an economy, such as banks as described in this paper, that can enforce contracts without court intervention, I conjecture that there is relatively little need for investor rights compared to countries where the courts are the primary contract enforcers. In support of this argument, I show that creditor rights play no role in bank-development in civil-law countries but they promote banking growth in common-law countries where courts are more efficient. This paper also reveals that some of the earlier analyses that used a pooled sample of common-law and civil-law countries to test the effect of investor rights on bank development are misspecified. Therefore, in this analysis, common-law and civil-law countries are analyzed separately. I also show that prevailing economic conditions and legal traditions jointly determine the financial structure of a country. Therefore, although a country's legal tradition is permanent, the organization of its financial system may fluctuate over time between a bank-dominated structure and a market-dominated structure. These results agree with the findings of Rajan and Zingales (2000) who showed that France and Germany were more market-friendly than U.S. and U.K. at the turn of the 20th century.