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Showing posts from December, 2018

A Risk Sharing View of Monetary Policy

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I have a new working paper titled " Better Risk Sharing Through Monetary Policy? The Financial Stability Case for a Nominal GDP Target " . I presented this paper at the recent Cato Monetary Policy Conference.  Here is the abstract: A series of papers have shown that a monetary regime targeting nominal GDP (NGDP) can reproduce the distribution of risk that would exist if there were widespread use of state contingentdebt securities (Koenig, 2013; Sheedy, 2014; Azariadis et al., 2016, Bullard and DiCecia, 2018). This paper empirically evaluates this view by exploiting an implication of the theory: those countries whose NGDP stayed closest to its expected pre-crisis growth path during the crisis should have experienced the least financial instability. This paper constructs an NGDP gap measure for 21 advanced economies that is used to test this implication. The results strongly suggest that there is a meaningful role for NGDP in promoting financial and economic stability. A...

How Close is the Fed to a Corridor System?

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I recently participated in an AEI event that showcased George Selgin's new book on the Fed's floor  system. My role at the event was to comment, along with  Bill Nelson , on George's book.  Readers of this blog will know I share many of George's concerns about the floor system that are outlined in his book and I would like to see the Fed move to a symmetric corridor system. The FOMC spent a good portion of its November meeting discussing this issue . My comments at the AEI event, however, were not on the tradeoffs between a corridor and floor system but rather on how close the Fed currently is to a corridor system. There are some indicators that the Fed may not be too far away. To illustrate my point, consider the figures below. The question I considered is how far the Fed is from transitioning from the figure on the left below to the one on the right. Note, that there are two ways to make this move. First, the supply of reserves (red line) can shift back ...