Central banks

Erin Troland, Isabella Agnes, Jessica Liu, Fatimah Shalaan, Michelle Tran, and Douglas WebberIn the pandemic era, people moved from high-density, expensive areas to more affordable areas, putting upward pressure on local housing prices. We examine the geographic distribution of rent growth during this time and its effects on renters.

Tobias Adrian, Domenico Giannone, Matteo Luciani, and Mike WestCentral banks monitor macroeconomic risk through two traditions: scenario analysis, regularly used since the mid-1990s, and distributional forecasting, practiced since the late 1960s. The two are complementary but separate: scenarios provide narratives without probabilities, while predictive distributions provide probabilities with limited economic interpretation.

Ozge Akinci, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, and Albert QueraltoWe study how increased uncertainty about U.S. asset returns affects global asset prices and exchange rates in a two-country model with intermediary balance-sheet constraints. Empirically, uncertainty shocks widen global credit spreads, appreciate the dollar, and increase currency risk premia. In our model, higher uncertainty tightens intermediary constraints and lowers asset prices, reversing the counterfactual asset price increase in frictionless models.

This paper examines whether environmental policy uncertainty undermines clean-technology investment in the United States by weakening policy-induced investment incentives. Using quarterly project-level data on U.S. greenfield investments from 2007Q1 to 2019Q1, combined with novel news-based indices that separately measure environmental policy salience and environmental policy uncertainty, we find that policy uncertainty substantially offsets the positive investment effects of environmental policy.