Central banks

The life-cycle dynamics of wealth mobility

We use 25 years of tax records for the Norwegian population to study the mobility of wealth over people’s lifetimes. We find considerable wealth mobility over the life cycle. To understand the underlying mobility patterns, we group individuals with similar wealth rank histories using agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a tool from statistical learning. The mobility patterns we elicit provide evidence of segmented mobility. Over 60 percent of the population remains at the top or bottom of the wealth distribution throughout their lives.

FEDS Paper: Inframarginal Borrowers and the Mortgage Payment Channel of Monetary Policy

Daniel RingoDespite the widespread use of fixed-rate mortgages in the United States, I show that monetary policy is effectively passed through to aggregate outstanding mortgage debt service. Using credit bureau, lender, and servicer data on mortgage payments and originations and exogenous monetary policy shocks, I estimate a mortgage rate semi-elasticity of payments over 10.

The transmission of bank credit conditions to firms-evidence from linked surveys

Using a novel dataset linking firm level data from the Survey on Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE) and bank level data from the Bank Lending Survey (BLS), we explore how changes in credit standards pass through to firms at a granular level. We find that tighter credit standards decrease loan availability reported by firms, increase the likelihood they report access to finance as the worst problem and decrease their investment. After controlling for country-sector-time fixed effects that capture cyclical macroeconomic conditions, effects only remain for firms that need finance.

FEDS Paper: Insurance, Weather, and Financial Stability

Charles M. Kahn, Ahyan Panjwani, and Joao A.C. SantosIn this paper, we introduce a model to study the interaction between insurance and banking. We build on the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980, which significantly expanded and restructured the decades-old federal crop insurance program and adverse weather shocks – over-exposure of crops to heat and acute weather events – to investigate some insights from our model.

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