The Predictive Power of the Senior Loan Officer Survey: Do Lending Officers Know Anything Special?

The answer to this question is yes, but not that much about banks. Every quarter the Federal Reserve System surveys a panel of senior loan officers at major banks across the nation. The results of this survey have been found in previous studies to provide useful information in predicting gross domestic product. This paper extends that work, finding that sector-specific survey results are relevant for predicting real activity in those sectors but, strangely, that the informative power of the survey results only marginally extend to various measures of performance in the banking sector

Person-to-Person Electronic Funds Transfers: Recent Developments and Policy Issues

The paper investigates the reasons why person-to-person electronic funds transfers are still not very common in the United States compared with practices in many other countries. The paper also describes recent enhancements to online and mobile banking that provide account holders with low-cost interfaces to manage person-to-person electronic funds transfers via automated clearing house (ACH). On the theoretical side, the paper characterizes the critical mass levels needed for payment instruments to become widely adopted. Given the Fed's long-term heavy involvement in check clearing, the paper concludes with policy discussions of whether intervention is needed

Gathering Insights on the Forest from the Trees: A New Metric for Financial Conditions

By incorporating the Harvey accumulator into the large approximate dynamic factor framework of Doz et al. (2006), we are able to construct a coincident index of financial conditions from a large unbalanced panel of mixed frequency financial indicators. We relate our financial conditions index, or FCI, to the concept of a financial crisis using Markov-switching techniques. After demonstrating the ability of the index to capture crisis periods in U.S. financial history, we present several policy-geared threshold rules for the FCI using Receiver Operator Characteristics (ROC) curve analysis

External increasing returns, short-lived agents and long-lived waste

Actions that affect environmental quality both influence and respond to macroeconomic variables. Further, many environmental and macroeconomic consequences of current actions will have uncompensated effects that outlive the actors. This paper presents an overlapping-generations model of environmental externalities and capital accumulation: consumption of the old generates long-lived garbage as a by-product, while young agents invest in both capital and destruction of the existing garbage stock. The model also assumes external increasing returns: increases in the capital stock increase the future productivity of capital. In the model, increases in the natural rate of degradation do, and improvements in society's ability to dispose of garbage may, encourage capital accumulation. Multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria can arise as a consequence of the interaction between garbage and capital accumulation. Underaccumulation of garbage, analogous to dynamically inefficient overaccumulation of capital, can arise in the model.Capital ; Natural resources