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.

Optimal Mitigation Policies in a Pandemic: Social Distancing and Working from Home

Abstract: We study the response of an economy to an unexpected epidemic. Households mitigate the spread of the disease by reducing consumption, reducing hours worked, and working from home. Working from home is subject to learning-by-doing and the capacity of the health care system is limited. A social planner worries about two externalities, an infection externality and a healthcare congestion externality. Private agents’ mitigation incentives are weak and biased. We show that private safety incentives can even decline at the onset of the epidemic. The planner, on the other hand, implements front-loaded mitigation policies and encourages working from home immediately. In our calibration, assuming a CFR of 1% and an initial infection rate of 0.1%, private mitigation reduces the cumulative death rate from 2.5% of the initially susceptible population to about 1.75%. The planner optimally imposes a drastic suppression policy and reduces the death rate to 0.15% at the cost of an initial drop in consumption of around 25%.

Macroeconomic Forecasting Performance under Alternative Specifications of Time-Varying Volatility

Abstract: Summary This paper compares alternative models of time-varying volatility on the basis of the accuracy of real-time point and density forecasts of key macroeconomic time series for the USA. We consider Bayesian autoregressive and vector autoregressive models that incorporate some form of time-varying volatility, precisely random walk stochastic volatility, stochastic volatility following a stationary AR process, stochastic volatility coupled with fat tails, GARCH and mixture of innovation models. The results show that the AR and VAR specifications with conventional stochastic volatility dominate other volatility specifications, in terms of point forecasting to some degree and density forecasting to a greater degree. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Exposure and Markups

Abstract: This article examines how to properly specify and test for factors that affect exchange-rate exposure. Starting from theoretical underpinnings and a sample of U.S. manufacturing industries between 1979 and 1995, we find that 4 of 18 industry groups are significantly exposed to exchange-rate movements through the effect of industry competitive structure, export share, and imported input share. On average, a 1% appreciation of the dollar decreases the return of the average industry by 0.13%. Consistent with our model’s predictions, as an industry’s markups fall (rise), its exchange-rate exposure increases (decreases). Exchange-rate movements are an important source of risk for a firm. They affect a firm’s expected cash flows and/or change the terms of competition for exporters, importers, and multinationals. Hung (1992) estimates that during the 1980s, U.S. manufacturing industries lost approximately $23 billion/year, or 10% of total profits, due to the dollar’s movements. Surprisingly, early studies which assume exchange-rate exposure to be constant [e.g., Jorion (1990), Bodnar and Gentry (1993) and Amihud (1994)] find that exchange rates have no effect on the stock returns of U.S. multinationals, exporters, or manufacturing industries. Recently, however, Allayannis (1997) and Bodnar, Dumas, and Marston (1998) examine time-varying exposure of industry returns. 1 In particular, the former article focuses on the effect the variation of U.S. industries’ import and export shares have on exposure, while the latter focuses on pass-through and exposure in a sample of Japanese export-oriented industries. Besides trade shares and pass-through, exchange-rate exposure also depends on the markup of an industry. Specifically, in industries with

A Network Analysis of Global Banking: 1978-2010

Abstract: We analyze the global banking network using data on cross-border banking flows for 184 countries during 1978–2010. We find that the density of the global banking network defined by these flows is procyclical, expanding and contracting with the global cycle of capital flows. We also find that country connectedness in the network tends to rise before banking and debt crises and to fall in their aftermath. Despite a historically unique build-up in aggregate flows prior to the global financial crisis, network density in 2007 was comparable to earlier peaks. This suggests that factors other than connectedness, such as the location of the initial shock to the core of the network, have contributed to the severity of the crisis. The global financial crisis stands out as an unusually large perturbation to the global banking network, with indicators of network density in 2008 reaching all-time lows.

Is Corporate Governance Ineffective in Emerging Markets

Abstract: I test whether corporate governance is ineffective in emerging markets by estimating the link between CEO turnover and firm performance for over 1,200 firms in eight emerging markets. I find two main results. First, CEOs of emerging market firms are more likely to lose their jobs when their firm's performance is poor, suggesting that corporate governance is not ineffective in emerging markets. Second, for the subset of firms with a large domestic shareholder, there is no link between CEO turnover and firm performance. For this subset of emerging market firms, corporate governance appears to be ineffective.