This paper uses historical labor market data to assess the plausibility that the Federal Reserve can engineer a soft landing for the economy. We first show that the labor market today is significantly tighter than implied by the unemployment rate: the vacancy and quit rates currently experienced...

High-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements are an important tool for identifying the effects of monetary policy on asset prices and the macroeconomy. However, some recent studies have questioned both the exogeneity and the relevance of these monetary policy surprises as...

This paper assesses the quantitative effects of a shift to monetary restraint in the United States on the DM-$ exchange rate and the German economy. The results indicate that such effects are large. If Germany keeps its money growth unchanged, it will tend to experience a sharp and sustained...

Using a large-scale survey of U.S. households during the Covid-19 pandemic, we study how new information about fiscal and monetary policy responses to the crisis affects households' expectations. We provide random subsets of participants in the Nielsen Homescan panel with different combinations...

We analyze the effect of the US Federal Reserve's monetary policy on EME sovereign and corporate bond markets by focusing on two dimensions: the evolution of the structure (size and currency composition) of the bond markets and their allocations within the bond portfolios of US investors. Global...

A vector autoregression with time-varying parameters is used to characterize changes in Federal Reserve policy that occurred from 2000 through 2007 and describe how they affected the performance of the U.S. economy. Declining coefficients in the model's estimated policy rule point to a shift in...

The Covid pandemic disrupted supply chains and labor markets, with heterogeneous effects on demand and supply across industries. Meanwhile governments responded with unprecedented stimulus packages, and inflation increased to its highest values in 40 years. In this paper I investigate the...

This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...

The European Central Bank is unique in setting monetary policy for several sovereign states with heterogeneous debt levels and different maturity structures. The monetary-fiscal nexus is central to the functioning of the euro area. We focus on one particular aspect of that nexus, the effect the...

We conduct a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of large-scale securities purchases, using the Federal Reserve's QE4 program as a concrete example. This program was initiated at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 and continued for two years, leading to a doubling of the Fed's...