Central banks

FEDS Paper: Labor Market Dynamics, Monetary Policy Tradeoffs, and a Shortfalls Approach to Pursuing Maximum Employment

08/22/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Brent Bundick, Isabel Cairó, and Nicolas Petrosky-NadeauThis paper reviews recent academic studies to assess the implications of adopting a shortfalls, rather than a deviations, approach to pursuing maximum employment. Model-based simulations from these studies suggest three main findings. First, shortfalls rules generate inflationary pressure relative to deviations rules, which offsets downward pressure on inflation stemming from the presence of the effective lower bound.

FEDS Paper: Retrospective on the Federal Reserve Board Staff’s Inflation Forecast Errors since 2019

08/22/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Ekaterina Peneva, Jeremy Rudd, and Daniel VillarThis paper examines the Board staff’s inflation forecast misses over the years following the COVID-19 outbreak, focusing on a timeline of what staff members knew when and lessons learned along the way.

FEDS Paper: Inflation since the Pandemic: Lessons and Challenges

08/22/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Ina Hajdini, Adam Shapiro, A. Lee Smith, and Daniel VillarThis paper reviews the drivers of the post-pandemic U.S. inflation surge and subsequent decline, including the behavior and role of inflation expectations. The sharp rise in inflation reflected severe imbalances between supply and demand stemming from the shocks of the pandemic and the policy response.

FEDS Paper: Pandemic and War Inflation: Lessons from the International Experience

08/22/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Anna Lipińska, Enrique Martínez García, and Felipe SchwartzmanThis paper examines the drivers of the 2020–23 inflation surge, with an emphasis on the similarities and differences across countries, as well as the role that monetary policy frameworks might have played in shaping central banks’ responses. The inflation surge in the U.S. and abroad was set in motion by two global events: the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Heterogeneous intermediaries in the transmission of central bank corporate bond purchases

08/21/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

This paper studies the role of financial intermediaries in the transmission of central bank corporate bond purchases to bond yields. Contrary to standard expectations, we find that mutual funds—typically viewed as price-elastic investors—amplify, rather than dampen, the effects of these interventions on bond spreads.

How to conduct joint Bayesian inference in VAR models?

08/20/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

When economic analysis requires simultaneous inference across multiple variables and time horizons, this paper shows that conventional pointwise quantiles in Bayesian structural vector autoregressions significantly understate the uncertainty of impulse responses. The performance of recently proposed joint inference methods, which produce noticeably different error band estimates, is evaluated, and calibration routines are suggested to ensure that they achieve the intended nominal probability coverage.

Unlocking growth? EU investment programmes and firm performance

08/19/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

This study evaluates the effectiveness of EU Cohesion Policy as an investment programme, employing a novel dataset that links firm-level data from Orbis with project-level information from the Kohesio database. It focuses on two key questions: (1) Which firms receive EU funding? (2) How does receiving EU funding affect firm performance? By applying a logit model and a local projection difference-in-differences approach, we provide new insights into the allocation mechanisms of EU Cohesion Policy funds and their firm-level impact.

Macroprudential and monetary policy interaction: the role of early activation of the countercyclical capital buffer

08/18/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

Amid changes in the global macro-financial environment, macroprudential policy within the banking union and beyond has increasingly prioritised the proactive enhancement of resilience. This article argues that this shift towards a more pre-emptive implementation of macroprudential policy has enhanced its complementarity with monetary policy.

FEDS Paper: Options on Interbank Rates and Implied Disaster Risk(Revised)

08/14/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Hitesh Doshi, Hyung Joo Kim, and Sang Byung SeoThe identification of disaster risk has remained a significant challenge due to the rarity of macroeconomic disasters. We show that the interbank market can help characterize the time variation in disaster risk. We propose a risk-based model in which macroeconomic disasters are likely to coincide with interbank market failure. Using interbank rates and their options, we estimate our model via MLE and filter the short-run and long-run components of disaster risk.

FEDS Paper: The Banking Panic in New Mexico in 1924 and the Response of the Federal Reserve

08/13/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Mark CarlsonThere was a banking panic in New Mexico in early 1924 when about one-fourth of the banks in the state closed temporarily or permanently amid widespread runs. The Federal Reserve used both high profile and behind the scenes operations to calm the panic. This paper provides a history of this episode and explores how conspicuous and inconspicuous aspects of the Federal Reserve's response interacted to bolster confidence in the banking system.

Central banks

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