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Staff working papers

Staff working papers provide a forum for staff to publish work-in-progress research intended for journal publication.

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1304 result(s)

Is the Discretionary Income Effect of Oil Price Shocks a Hoax?

Staff Working Paper 2017-50 Christiane Baumeister, Lutz Kilian, Xiaoqing Zhou
The transmission of oil price shocks has been a question of central interest in macroeconomics since the 1970s. There has been renewed interest in this question after the large and persistent fall in the real price of oil in 2014–16. In the context of this debate, Ramey (2017) makes the striking claim that the existing literature on the transmission of oil price shocks is fundamentally confused about the question of how to quantify the effect of oil price shocks.

The Causal Impact of Migration on US Trade: Evidence from Political Refugees

Staff Working Paper 2017-49 Walter Steingress
Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variation across U.S. states for the period 2008 to 2013, I estimate the respective causal impact of immigrants on U.S. exports and imports.

Optimal Interbank Regulation

Staff Working Paper 2017-48 Thomas J. Carter
Recent years have seen renewed interest in the regulation of interbank markets. A review of the literature in this area identifies two gaps: first, the literature has tended to make ad hoc assumptions about the interbank contract space, which makes it difficult to generate convincing policy prescriptions; second, the literature has tended to focus on ex-post interventions that kick in only after an interbank disruption has come underway (e.g., open-market operations, lender-of-last-resort interventions, bail-outs), rather than ex-ante prudential policies.

Cash Versus Card: Payment Discontinuities and the Burden of Holding Coins

Staff Working Paper 2017-47 Heng Chen, Kim Huynh, Oz Shy
Cash is the preferred method of payment for small value transactions generally less than $25. We provide insight to this finding with a new theoretical model that characterizes and compares consumers’ costs of paying with cash to paying with cards for each transaction.

On the Tail Risk Premium in the Oil Market

Staff Working Paper 2017-46 Reinhard Ellwanger
This paper shows that changes in market participants’ fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and significantly forecast crude oil futures and spot returns.

Identification of Random Resource Shares in Collective Households Without Preference Similarity Restrictions

Staff Working Paper 2017-45 Geoffrey R. Dunbar, Arthur Lewbel, Krishna Pendakur
Resource shares, defined as the fraction of total household spending going to each person in a household, are important for assessing individual material well-being, inequality and poverty. They are difficult to identify because consumption is measured typically at the household level, and many goods are jointly consumed, so that individual-level consumption in multi-person households is not directly observed.

Measuring Limits of Arbitrage in Fixed-Income Markets

Staff Working Paper 2017-44 Jean-Sébastien Fontaine, Guillaume Nolin
We use relative value to measure limits to arbitrage in fixed-income markets. Relative value captures apparent deviations from no-arbitrage relationships. It is simple, intuitive and can be computed model-free for any bond.

Policy Rules for Capital Controls

Staff Working Paper 2017-42 Gurnain Pasricha
This paper attempts to borrow the tradition of estimating policy reaction functions in monetary policy literature and apply it to capital controls policy literature. Using a novel weekly dataset on capital controls policy actions in 21 emerging economies over the period 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2015, I examine the mercantilist and macroprudential motivations for capital control policies.

Global Trade Flows: Revisiting the Exchange Rate Elasticities

This paper contributes to the debate on the magnitude of exchange rate elasticities by providing a set of price and quantity elasticities for 51 advanced and emerging-market economies. Specifically, for each of these countries we report the elasticity of trade prices and trade quantities on both the export and on the import sides, as well as the reaction of the trade balance.
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