Working Paper Archives
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critial comment.
Finance
Can Self-Help Groups Really Be Self-Help?
This paper examines a cost-reducing innovation to the delivery of Self-Help Group microfinance services.
How Did the Financial Crisis Alter the Correlations of U.S. Yield Spreads?
We investigate the pairwise correlations of 11 U.S. fixed income yield spreads over a sample that includes the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.
Too Big to Cheat: Efficiency and Investment in Partnerships
This paper studies the efficient arrangement among several agents that are subject to idiosyncratic, privately observed taste shocks affecting their marginal utility of current consumption.
The Lender of Last Resort: Lessons from the Fed’s First 100 Years
We review the responses of the Federal Reserve to financial crises over the past 100 years. The authors of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 created an institution that they hoped would prevent banking panics from occurring.
What Do We Know about the Relationship between Access to Finance and International Trade?
The recent financial crisis has focused attention on the relationship between access to finance and international trade, triggering a burgeoning segment of the literature evaluating this link empirically.
Testing the Economic Value of Asset Return Predictability
Economic value calculations are increasingly used to compare the predictive performance of competing models of asset returns. However, they lack a rigorous way to validate their evidence.
Endogenous Credit Limits with Small Default Costs
We analyze an exchange economy of unsecured credit where borrowers have the option to declare bankruptcy in which case they are temporarily excluded from financial markets.
This paper argues that self-fulfilling beliefs in credit conditions can generate endoge- nously persistent business cycle dynamics. We develop a tractable dynamic general equi- librium model in which heterogeneous firms face idiosyncratic productivity shocks.
Bankruptcy and Delinquency in a Model of Unsecured Debt
Limited commitment for the repayment of unsecured consumer debt originates from two places: (i) formal bankruptcy laws granting a partial or complete legal removal of unsecured debts under certain circumstances, and (ii) informal default followed by renegotiation, "delinquency."
Why Doesn’t Technology Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?
What determines the technology that a country adopts? While there could be many factors, the efficiency of the country’s financial system may play a significant role.
International Channels of the Fed’s Unconventional Monetary Policy
Previous research has established that the Federal Reserve’s large scale asset purchases (LSAPs) significantly influenced international bond yields.
Econometric Modeling of Exchange Rate Volatility and Jumps
This chapter reviews the rapid advances in foreign exchange volatility modeling made in the last three decades.
Federal Reserve Lending to Troubled Banks During the Financial Crisis, 2007-10
Numerous commentaries have questioned both the legality and appropriateness of Federal Reserve lending to banks during the recent financial crisis.
Did Affordable Housing Legislation Contribute to the Subprime Securities Boom?
No. In this paper we use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced origination or affected prices of subprime mort- gages.
Credit Scoring and Loan Default
This paper introduces a measure of credit score performance that abstracts from the influence of "situational factors." Using this measure, we study the role and effectiveness of credit scoring that underlied subprime securities during the mortgage boom of 2000-2006.
What do happiness and health satisfaction data tell us about relative risk aversion?
In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion using information on self-reports of subjective personal well-being from three datasets: the Gallup World Poll, the European Social Survey, and the World Values Survey.
We study the contraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows in the United States during the recent financial crisis and show their unusual non-resiliency, which depends in part on the global nature of the economic recession, but also on the increases in the cost of financing FDI in the economies in which the flows originate.
The Effect of Neighborhood Spillovers on Mortgage Selection
In this paper we analyze how spillovers in mortgage adoption affect mortgage product choice across neighborhoods and across borrowers of different racial or ethnic groups.
Capital Flows and Japanese Asset Volatility
Characterizing asset price volatility is an important goal for financial economists. The literature has shown that variables that proxy for the information arrival process can help explain and/or forecast volatility.
Should Easier Access to International Credit Replace Foreign Aid?
We examine the interaction between foreign aid and binding borrowing constraint for a recipient country. We also analyze how these two instruments affect economic growth via non-linear relationships. First of all, we develop a two-country, two-period trade-theoretic model to develop testable hypotheses and then we use dynamic panel analysis to test those hypotheses empirically. Our main findings are that: (i) better access to international credit for a recipient country reduces the amount of foreign aid it receives, and (ii) there is a critical level of international financial transfer, and the marginal effect of foreign aid is larger than that of loans if and only if the transfer (loans or foreign aid) is below this critical level.
Lessons from the Evolution of Foreign Exchange Trading Strategies
The adaptive markets hypothesis posits that trading strategies evolve as traders adapt their behavior to changing circumstances.
We incorporate house price risk and mortgages into a standard incomplete market (SIM) model. We calibrate the model to match U.S. data and we show that the model also ac- counts for non-targeted features of the data such as the distribution of down payments, the life-cycle profile of home ownership, and the mortgage default rate.
Negative Correlation between Stock and Futures Returns: An Unexploited Hedging Opportunity?
The negative correlation between equity and commodity futures returns is widely perceived by investors as an unexploited hedging opportunity.
This paper analyzes the empirical performance of two alternative ways in which multi-factor models with time-varying risk exposures and premia may be estimated. The first method echoes the seminal two-pass approach advocated by Fama and MacBeth (1973).
Did Doubling Reserve Requirements Cause the Recession of 1937-1938? A Microeconomic Approach
In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled the reserve requirements imposed on member banks. Ever since, the question of whether the doubling of reserve requirements increased reserve demand and produced a contraction of money and credit, and thereby helped to cause the recession of 1937-1938, has been a matter of controversy.
Technical Analysis in the Foreign Exchange Market
This article introduces the subject of technical analysis in the foreign exchange market, with emphasis on its importance for questions of market efficiency. “Technicians” view their craft, the study of price patterns, as exploiting traders’ psychological regularities.
Regime Shifts in Mean-Variance Efficient Frontiers: Some International Evidence
Regime switching models have been assuming a central role in financial applications because of their well-known ability to capture the presence of rich non-linear patterns in the joint distribution of asset returns.
We perform a comprehensive examination of the recursive, comparative predictive performance of a number of linear and non-linear models for UK stock and bond returns.
Out-of-Sample Predictions of Bond Excess Returns with Forward Rates: An Asset-Allocation Perspective
This paper investigates the out-of-sample predictability of bond excess returns.
Ambiguity in Asset Pricing and Portfolio Choice: A Review of the Literature
A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that investors’ behavior is not well described by the traditional paradigm of (subjective) expected utility maximization under rational expectations.
