Economic Activity and the Short-term Credit Markets: An Analysis of Prices and Quantities

macroeconomics, economic activity, short-term, credit markets, price, quantities

A Price Target for U.S. Monetary Policy? Lessons from the Experience with Money Growth Targets

macroeconomics, Price Target, U.S. Monetary Policy, Money Growth Targets

Why Does the Paper-Bill Spread Predict Real Economic Activity?

Evidence based on the past three decades of U.S. experience shows that the difference between the interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills has consistently borne a systematic relationship to subsequent fluctuations of nonfinancial economic activity. This interest rate spread typically widens in advance of recessions, and narrows again before recoveries. The relationship remains valid even after allowance for other financial variables that previous researchers have often advanced as potential business cycle predictors. This paper provides support for each of three different explanations for this predictive power of the paper?bill spread. First, changing perceptions of default risk exert a clearly recognizable influence on the spread. This influence is all the more discernable after allowance for effects associated with the changing volume of paper issuance when investors view commercial paper and Treasury bills as imperfect portfolio substitutes -- a key assumption for which the evidence introduced here provides support. Second, again under conditions of imperfect substitutability, a widening paper-bill spread is also a symptom of the contraction in bank lending due to tighter monetary policy. Third, there is also evidence of a further role for independent changes in the behavior of borrowers in the commercial paper market due to their changing cash requirements over the course of the business cycle.

Time-Varying Risk Perceptions and the Pricing of Risky Assets

Empirical results based on two different statistical approaches lead to several conclusions about the role of time-varying asset risk assessments in accounting for what, on the basis of many earlier studies, appear to be time-varying differentials in ex ante asset returns. First, both methods indicate sizeable changes over time in variance-covariance structures conditional on past information. These changing conditional variance-covariance structures in turn imply sizeable changes over time in asset demand behavior, and hence in the market-clearing equilibrium structure of ex ante asset returns. Second, at least for some values of the parameter indicating how rapidly investors discount the information contained in past observations, the implied ex ante excess returns bear non-negligible correlation to observed ex post excess returns on either debt or equity. The percentage of the variation of ex post excess returns explained by the implied time-varying ex ante excess returns is comparable to values to which previous researchers have interpreted as warranting rejection of the hypothesis that risk premia are constant over time. Third, although for long-term debt the two statistical methods used here give sharply different answers to the question of how much relevance market participants associate with past observations in assessing future risks, for equities both methods agree in indicating extremely rapid discounting of more distant observations -- so much so that in neither case do outcomes more than a year in the past matter much at all. While the paper's other conclusions are plausible enough, the finding of such an extremely short "memory" on the part of equity investors suggests that the standard representation of equity risk by a single normally distributed disturbance is overly restrictive.

Sources of New York employment fluctuations

The authors analyze employment growth in the metropolitan region and its relationship to employment in the United States as a whole. They identify a strong cyclical link between the region and the nation, punctuated by occasional, persistent shifts in the region's underlying growth rate. Some shifts are found to be related to industry factors, such as the restructuring of financial services in the late 1980s. However, the authors attribute a large and increasing share of New York employment fluctuations to region-specific factors.Employment (Economic theory) ; New York (N.Y.) ; Federal Reserve District, 2nd

Indicator Properties of the Paper-Bill Spread: Lessons from Recent Experiences

A feature of U.S. post-war business cycle experience that is by now widely documented is the tendency of the spread between the respective interest rates on commercial paper and Treasury bills to widen shortly before the onset of recessions. By contrast, the paper- bill spread did not anticipate the 1990-91 recession. Empirical work presented in this paper supports two (not mutually exclusive) explanations for this departure from past experience. First, at least part of the paper-bill spread's predictive content with respect to business cycle fluctuations stems from its role as an indicator of monetary policy, but the 1990-91 recession was unusual in post-war U.S. experience in not being immediately precipitated by tight monetary policy. Second, movements of the spread during the few years just prior to the 1990-91 recession were strongly influenced by changes in the relative quantities of commercial paper, bank CDs and Treasury bills that occurred for reasons unrelated to the business cycle. This latter finding in particular sheds light on the important role of imperfect substitutability of different short-term debt instruments in investors portfolios, and highlights the burdens associated with using relative interest rate relationships as business cycle indicators.

Response to Nauenberg's "Critique of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness"

Nauenberg's extended critique of Quantum Enigma rests on fundamental misunderstandings.Comment: To be published in Foundations of Physic

SERS and plasmonic heating efficiency from anisotropic core/satellite superstructures

The optical properties of nanoparticle assemblies can be tailored via hybridization of plasmon modes. Isotropic core/satellite superstructures made of spherical nanoparticles are known to exhibit coupled modes with a strongly scattering (radiative) character, and provide hot spots yielding high activity in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). However, to complement this functionality with plasmonic heating, additional absorbing (non-radiative) modes are required. We introduce herein anisotropic superstructures formed by decorating a central nanorod with spherical satellite nanoparticles, which feature two coupled modes that allow application for both SERS and heating. On the basis of diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), and electromagnetic simulations, the origin of the coupled modes is disclosed and thus serves as a basis toward alternative designs of functional superstructures. This work represents a proof-of-principle for the combination of high SERS efficiency with efficient plasmonic heating by near-infrared irradiation

Another Look at the Evidence on Money-Income Causality

Stock and Watson's widely noted finding that money has statistically significant marginal predictive power with respect to real output (as measured by industrial production), even in a sample extending through 1985 and even in the presence of a short-term interest rate, is not robust to two plausible changes. First, extending the sample through 1990 renders money insignificant within Stock and Watson's chosen specification. Second, using the commercial paper rate in place of the Treasury bill rate renders money insignificant even in the sample ending in 1985. A positive finding is that the difference between the commercial paper rate and the Treasury bill rate does have highly significant predictive value for real output, even in the presence of money, regardless of sample. Alternative results based on forecast error variance decomposition in a vector autoregression setting confirm these findings by indicating a small and generally insignificant effect of money, and a large, highly significant effect of the paper-bill spread, on real output.