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This article analyses the effects of the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE) on global portfolio flows, differentiating across recipient region of the flows, type of flow and QE rounds. Furthermore, the analysis differentiates between the impact of QE expansionary announcements and the actual market operations. The analysis shows that QE1 resulted in (slight) rebalancing towards the US, while QE2 and QE3 resulted in rebalancing towards non-US assets. This suggests that QE increased the procyclicality of flows outside the US, in particular into emerging market equities. The results also suggest a link between US macro-financial conditions and the transmission of QE to portfolio flows.

We quantify government spending multipliers in US data using Bayesian prior and posterior analysis of a monetary model with fiscal details and two distinct monetary-fiscal policy regimes. The combination of model specification, observable data, and relatively diffuse priors for some parameters lands posterior estimates in regions of the parameter space that yield fresh perspectives on the transmission mechanisms that underlie government spending multipliers. Short-run output multipliers are comparable across regimes—posterior means around 1.3 on impact—but much larger after 10 years under passive money/active fiscal than under active money/passive fiscal—90 percent credible sets of [1.5, 1.9] versus [0.1, 0.4] in present value, when estimated from 1955 to 2016.

The role of real estate during the global financial and economic crisis has prompted efforts to better incorporate housing and financial channels into macro models, improve housing models, develop macroprudential tools, and reform the financial system. This article provides an overview of major, recent contributions to the literature in relation to earlier research on what drives housing prices and how they affect economic activity. Particularly emphasized are studies, both theoretical and more strongly evidence-based, that connect housing markets with credit markets, house price expectations, financial stability, and the wider economy. The literature reveals much diversity in the international and regional behavior of house prices and the need to improve data tracking key housing supply and demand influences. Also reviewed are studies examining how monetary, macroprudential, and other policies affect house prices and access to housing. This survey is designed to help readers navigate the plethora of recent studies and understand the unsettled issues and avenues for further research. The findings should be of interest to policy makers concerned with financial stability as well as those dealing with the role of housing in the wider economy

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as \"hysteresis,\" argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivates this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis (or \"scarring\" in recent parlance) has been sparked by the persistent impact of the global financial crisis—as GDP in advanced economies remained far below the precrisis trends for over a decade—and recent concerns about the lasting impact of the COVID-19 shock. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

In this essay, we discuss the emerging literature in macroeconomics that combines heterogeneous agent models, nominal rigidities, and aggregate shocks. This literature opens the door to the analysis of distributional issues, economic fluctuations, and stabilization policies—all within the same framework. In response to the limitations of the representative agent approach to economic fluctuations, a new framework has emerged that combines key features of heterogeneous agents (HA) and New Keynesian (NK) economies. These HANK models offer a much more accurate representation of household consumption behavior and can generate realistic distributions of income, wealth, and, albeit to a lesser degree, household balance sheets. At the same time, they can accommodate many sources of macroeconomic fluctuations, including those driven by aggregate demand. In sum, they provide a rich theoretical framework for quantitative analysis of the interaction between cross-sectional distributions and aggregate dynamics. In this article, we outline a state-of-the-art version of HANK together with its representative agent counterpart, and convey two broad messages about the role of household heterogeneity for the response of the macroeconomy to aggregate shocks: 1) the similarity between the Representative Agent New Keynesian (RANK) and HANK frameworks depends crucially on the shock being analyzed; and 2) certain important macroeconomic questions concerning economic fluctuations can only be addressed within heterogeneous agent models.

In November 2008, the Federal Reserve faced a deteriorating economy and a financial crisis. The federal funds rate had already been reduced to virtually zero. Thus, the Federal Reserve turned to unconventional monetary policies. Through “quantitative easing,” the Fed announced plans to buy mortgage-backed securities and debt issued by government-sponsored enterprises. Subsequent purchases would eventually lead to a five-fold expansion in the Fed’s balance sheet, from$900 billion to $ 4.5 trillion, and leave the Fed holding over 20 percent of all mortgage-backed securities and marketable Treasury debt. In addition, Fed policy statements in December 2008 began to include explicit references to the likely path of the federal funds interest rate, a policy that came to be known as “forward guidance.” The Fed ceased its direct asset purchases in late 2014. Starting in October 2017, it has allowed the balance sheet to shrink gradually as existing assets mature. From December 2015 through June 2018, the Fed has raised the federal funds interest rate seven times. Thus, the time is ripe to step back and ask whether the Fed’s unconventional policies had the intended expansionary effects—and by extension, whether the Fed should use them in the future.

We propose a theory of monetary policy and macroprudential interventions in financial markets. We focus on economies with nominal rigidities in goods and labor markets and subject to constraints on monetary policy, such as the zero lower bound or fixed exchange rates. We identify an aggregate demand externality that can be corrected by macroprudential interventions in financial markets. Ex post, the distribution of wealth across agents affects aggregate demand and output. Ex ante, however, these effects are not internalized in private financial decisions. We provide a simple formula for the required financial interventions that depends on a small number of measurable sufficient statistics. We also characterize optimal monetary policy. We extend our framework to incorporate pecuniary externalities, providing a unified approach to both externalities. Finally, we provide a number of applications which illustrate the relevance of our theory.

In this paper, we study the relationship between Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Using an extensive dataset from 23 countries consisting of 6800 firm-year observations, we provide strong evidence that EPU increases firms’ CO2 emissions. Our main inference is robust when using alternative measures of CO2 emissions and EPU, alternative econometric specifications and samples, and several approaches to control for possible endogeneity. In a set of additional analyses, we first show that a board’s characteristics (i.e., board gender diversity and board independence) significantly moderate the studied relationship. Second, cross-country characteristics (i.e., government effectiveness, control of corruption, and democracy) seem important in the relationship between EPU and CO2 emissions. Our findings significantly contribute to the debate on firms’ ethical responsibility in managing climate change and CO2 emissions.

How should macroprudential policy be designed when policymakers also have access to liquidity provision tools to manage crises? We show in a tractable model of systemic banking risk that there are three factors at play: first, ex post liquidity provision mitigates financial crises, and this reduces the need for macroprudential policy. In the extreme, if liquidity provision is untargeted and costless or if it completely forestalls crises by credible out-of-equilibrium lending-of-last-resort, there is no role left for macroprudential regulation. Second, however, macroprudential policy needs to consider the ex ante incentive effects of targeted liquidity provision. Third, if shadow banking reduces the effectiveness of macroprudential instruments, it is optimal to commit to less generous liquidity provision as a second-best substitute for macroprudential policy.

Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) are frequently thought of as risk-free real bonds. Using no-arbitrage term structure models, we show that TIPS yields exceeded risk-free real yields by as much as 100 basis points when TIPS were first issued and up to 300 basis points during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. This spread predominantly reflects the poorer liquidity of TIPS relative to nominal Treasury securities. Other factors, including the indexation lag and the embedded deflation protection in TIPS, play a much smaller role. Ignoring this spread also significantly distorts the informational content of TIPS break-even inflation, a widely used proxy for expected inflation.