Systematic Monetary Policy and the Effects of Oil Price Shocks

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Gender Differences in Russian Colour Naming

In the present study we explored Russian colour naming in a web-based psycholinguistic experiment (http://www.colournaming.com). Colour singletons representing the Munsell Color Solid (N=600 in total) were presented on a computer monitor and named using an unconstrained colour-naming method. Respondents were Russian speakers (N=713). For gender-split equal-size samples (NF=333, NM=333) we estimated and compared (i) location of centroids of 12 Russian basic colour terms (BCTs); (ii) the number of words in colour descriptors; (iii) occurrences of BCTs most frequent non-BCTs. We found a close correspondence between females’ and males’ BCT centroids. Among individual BCTs, the highest inter-gender agreement was for seryj ‘grey’ and goluboj ‘light blue’, while the lowest was for sinij ‘dark blue’ and krasnyj ‘red’. Females revealed a significantly richer repertory of distinct colour descriptors, with great variety of monolexemic non-BCTs and “fancy” colour names; in comparison, males offered relatively more BCTs or their compounds. Along with these measures, we gauged denotata of most frequent CTs, reflected by linguistic segmentation of colour space, by employing a synthetic observer trained by gender-specific responses. This psycholinguistic representation revealed females’ more refined linguistic segmentation, compared to males, with higher linguistic density predominantly along the redgreen axis of colour space

The Interplay between Financial Conditions and Monetary Policy Shocks

We study the interplay between monetary policy and financial conditions shocks. Such shocks have a significant and similar impact on the real economy, though with different degrees of persistence. The systematic fed funds rate response to a financial shock contributes to bringing the economy back towards trend, but a zero lower bound on policy rates can prevent this from happening, with a significant cost in terms of output and investment. In a retrospective analysis of the U.S. economy over the past 20 years, we decompose the realization of economic variables into the contributions of financial, monetary policy, and other shocks

Selection into Financial Literacy Programs: Evidence from a Field Study

As financial literacy has been shown to correlate with good financial decisions, policymakers promote educational programs to improve individuals' financial decisions. But who selects into educational programs and who acquires information about personal finance? This paper, in a field study with more than 870 individuals, offers individuals free information about their credit reports (and credit scores). About 55 percent choose to participate in this small counseling program. To test whether those who self-select to acquire information about personal finance differ from those who do not on (normally) unobservable characteristics, we elicit time preferences, using incentivized choice experiments. Our results show that the two groups differ sharply in their discount factors: those who choose to acquire information do not discount the future as much as those who choose not to acquire information. This result has implications for financial education programs

The Effects of a Declining Housing Market on the U.S. Economy

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing price decreases on real private expenditure, examines the role of new types of mortgages and mortgage-related securities, and analyzes possible policy responses