Staff working papers

We propose an early warning model for predicting the likelihood of a financial stress event for a given future time, and examine whether credit plays an important role in the model as a non-linear propagator of shocks.

In August 2012, the New York Stock Exchange launched the Retail Liquidity Program (RLP), a trading facility that enables participating organizations to quote dark limit orders executable only by retail traders.

Should monetary policy lean against housing market booms? We approach this question using a small-scale, regime-switching New Keynesian model, where housing market crashes arrive with a logit probability that depends on the level of household debt.

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset.

We model the asset-opacity choice of an intermediary subject to rollover risk in wholesale funding markets. Greater opacity means investors form more dispersed beliefs about an intermediary’s profitability.

In this piece we show that a limit on the level of asset encumbrance and minimum capital requirements are effective tools for minimizing the incentive for banks to take excessive risk.

Given its size and importance for global commodity markets, the question of how fast the Chinese economy can grow over the medium term is an important one. This paper addresses this question by examining the evolution of the supply side of the Chinese economy over history and projecting how it will evolve over the next 15 years.

This paper imagines a world in which countries are on the Bitcoin standard, a monetary system in which all media of exchange are Bitcoin or are backed by it. The paper explores the similarities and differences between the Bitcoin standard and the gold standard and describes the media of exchange that would exist under the Bitcoin standard.

Foreign investment is often constrained by two forms of political risk: expropriation and corruption. We examine the role of government corruption in foreign direct investment (FDI) when contracts are not fully transparent and investors face the threat of expropriation.

We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral.