Research Department Working Papers
The Conventional Impulse Response Prior in VAR Models with Sign Restrictions
Some studies have expressed concern that the Gaussian-inverse Wishart-Haar prior typically employed in estimating sign-identified VAR models may be unintentionally informative about the implied prior for the structural impulse responses. This paper discusses how this prior may be reported and makes explicit what impulse response priors a number of recently published studies specified, allowing the readers to decide whether they are comfortable with this prior.
May 09, 2025
Research Department Working Papers
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms and Trickle-Up Economics
This paper proposes a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes.
April 24, 2025
Research Department Working Papers
Revisiting the Interest Rate Effects of Federal Debt
This paper revisits the relationship between federal debt and interest rates. A common approach in the literature is to regress an expected interest rate on a projection of federal debt. This paper shows that issues related to nonstationarity have become more pronounced over the last 20 years, raising significant concern about the reliability of estimates from this model. The authors argue that estimating the model in first differences rather than in levels addresses these concerns.
April 23, 2025
Research Department Working Papers
Tempting FAIT: Flexible Average Inflation Targeting and the Post-COVID U.S. Inflation Surge
In August 2020, the Federal Reserve replaced Flexible Inflation Targeting (FIT) with Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (FAIT), introducing make-up strategies that allow inflation to temporarily exceed the 2% target. Using a synthetic control approach, this paper estimates that FAIT raised CPI inflation by about 1 percentage point and core CPI inflation by 0.5 percentage points, suggesting a moderate impact net of food and energy and a largely temporary effect. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis of a steeper-than-expected post-pandemic Phillips curve in the New Keynesian model.
April 09, 2025
Research Department Working Papers
Impulse Response Diagnostics for Priors on Parameters in Structural Vector Autoregressions
This paper proposes verifying that the prior distribution of impulse responses in structural VAR models is not unintentionally informative and discusses diagnostic tools to help practitioners ensure their priors do not unduly influence their reported conclusions.
February 25, 2025
Research Department Working Papers
Nonparametric Local Projections
This paper studies the properties of an alternative nonparametric local projection estimator of the conditional and unconditional responses of an outcome variable to an observed identified shock.
November 20, 2024
Research Department Working Papers
A Robust Test for Weak Instruments for 2SLS with Multiple Endogenous Regressors
This paper develops a test for instrument strength based on the bias of two-stage least squares (2SLS) that (1) generalizes the tests of Stock and Yogo (2005) and Sanderson and Windmeijer (2016) to be robust to heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation, and (2) extends the Montiel Olea and Pflueger (2013) robust test for models with a single endogenous regressor to multiple endogenous regressors.
September 26, 2024
Globalization Institute Working Paper
The Contribution of Foreign Holdings of U.S. Treasury Securities to the U.S. Long-Term Interest Rate: An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of the Zero Lower Bound
This paper finds empirical evidence of a possible structural break in the relationship between the foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and the U.S. long-term interest rate occurring at the time when U.S. monetary policy became constrained at the zero-lower bound (ZLB).
September 25, 2024
Globalization Institute Working Paper
Just Do IT? An Assessment of Inflation Targeting in a Global Comparative Case Study
This paper introduces novel measures to assess the effectiveness of inflation targeting (IT) and examines its performance across a broad sample of advanced economies (AEs) and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs).
August 21, 2024
Globalization Institute Working Paper
Xtpb: The Pooled Bewley Estimator of Long Run Relationships in Dynamic Heterogeneous Panels
This paper introduces a new Stata command, xtpb, that implements the Chudik, Pesaran and Smith (2023) Pooled Bewley (PB) estimator of long-run relationships in dynamic heterogeneous panel-data models.
August 20, 2024