Measuring Federal Reserve officials’ secret disagreement behind locked doors of FOMC meetings
Dissent votes in Federal Reserve policy meetings are rare, accounting for only 6.37% of the votes between 1976 and 2017. However, opting not to vote against the FOMC consensus doesn't necessarily mean committee members don't "disagree" with it.
“Concrete Economics” Review
Prof. Brad Delong's blogs, either "bradford-delong.com" or over at " Equitable Growth" , are definitely two of the most influential economics blogs in the...
Federal Reserve has never been this ‘confused’ about neutral rate
Federal Reserve decided to cut rate by an supersized 0.5 percentage point. The decision finally ended the weeks-long market debate of whether the central bank would cut 25 or 50 basis points. One important thing, though, didn't reach the headline: The Fed has never been this "confused" about where the natural rate should be.
Why Negative Rate is a better policy tool to Higher Inflation Target? Bernanke Explains…
In his latest Brookings blog post "Modifying the Fed’s policy framework: Does a higher inflation target beat negative interest rates?", Ben Bernanke compares two...
IMF Growth Projections and Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts
In a recent IMF working paper "Overfitting in Judgment-based Economic Forecasts: The Case of IMF Growth Projections", economist Klaus-Peter Hellwig examined IMF's World Economic Forecasts (WEO) and check if the forecast model suffer from the problem of overfitting.
DSGE model and the State of Macroeconomics | Q&A with Olivier Blanchard |
In this interview, Blanchard discussed his view on the role of DSGE model in modern Macroeconomics and policymaking. He also explained his decision to rewrite his macroeconomics textbooks after the Great Recession. His recent research on hysteresis was also discussed.
A skeptical review of the QEs – why they might not be powerful as...
In their working paper "A Skeptical View of the Impact of the Fed's Balance Sheet," economists David Greenlaw, James D. Hamilton, Ethan Harris, and Kenneth D. West challenge some earlier studies that concluded QEs have a significant economic impact. Their major argument is that those research used simple event studies to quantify the impact of QE.
Why the Fed should Keep a Sizeable Balance Sheet? | Q&A with Jeremy...
Jeremy Stein, former Federal Reserve governor, talks to us about his recent research “The Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool” and why the Fed should maintain a sizeable balance sheet.
Is there a Zero Lower Bound?
In a recent research, four European Central Bank economists found that negative interest rate policy in the eurozone can encourage banks to increase lending and encourage cooperations to increase investments.
That is, contrary to what macroeconomics models usually predict, interest rate policy can still has stimulative effect even the zero lower bound is reached.
CoCo issuance and bank fragility
A series of papers by Stefan Avdjiev, Bilyana Bogdanova, Patrick Bolton, Wei Jiang, and Anastasia Kartasheva on this topic is highly recommended.














