E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
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Do Sunspots Matter? Evidence from an Experimental Study of Bank Runs
A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to sunspots in the context of a bank-run game in a controlled laboratory environment. -
Labor Market Participation, Unemployment and Monetary Policy
We incorporate a participation decision in a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions and show that treating the labor force as constant leads to incorrect evaluation of alternative policies. -
Banks’ Financial Distress, Lending Supply and Consumption Expenditure
The paper employs a unique identification strategy that links survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank-level data in order to estimate the effects of bank financial distress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures. -
A Policy Model to Analyze Macroprudential Regulations and Monetary Policy
We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features. -
Technology Shocks, Labour Mobility and Aggregate Fluctuations
We provide evidence regarding the dynamic behaviour of net labour flows across U.S. states in response to a positive technology shock. Technology shocks are identified as disturbances that increase relative state productivity in the long run for 226 state pairs, encompassing 80 per cent of labour flows across U.S. states in the 1976 - 2008 period. -
Search-for-Yield in Canadian Fixed-Income Mutual Funds and Monetary Policy
This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on the risk-taking behavior of fixed-income mutual funds in Canada. We consider different measures of the stance of monetary policy and investigate active variation in mutual funds’ risk exposure in response to monetary policy. -
Household Risk Management and Actual Mortgage Choice in the Euro Area
Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross‐country study has analyzed what determines household demand for mortgage types, a task that this paper takes up using new data for the euro area. -
Cash Management and Payment Choices: A Simulation Model with International Comparisons
Despite various payment innovations, today, cash is still heavily used to pay for low-value purchases. This paper develops a simulation model to test whether standard implications of the theory on cash management and payment choices can explain the use of payment instruments by transaction size. -
Do Oil Price Increases Cause Higher Food Prices?
U.S. retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms, but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in U.S. biofuel policies in 2006. In contrast, increases in the real prices of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice received by U.S. farmers have been more substantial and can be linked in part to increases in the real price of oil.