FEDS Paper: Does Financial Stress Affect Commodity Futures Traders' Positions?(Revised)

11/04/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Shengwu Du, Travis D. Nesmith, and Yang HeppeFinancial stress can impact trading behavior in the U.S. commodity futures markets. To clarify the impact, we study absolute changes and relative exposure dynamics in traders' positions during two recent crises: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of these two crises are very distinct, and we find that traders behaved quite differently.

Reputation for Confidence

11/04/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

We model how a central bank communicates its noisy forecasts (forward guidance) while taking into account its own uncertainty (confidence) and the public’s perception of the bank’s uncertainty (reputation for confidence). This creates a mismatch between the public and central bank’s interpretation of the bank announcement which induces the bank to communicate with partial transparency and deliberate imprecision. Moreover, with higher confidence (lower reputation) announcements are more precise.

Developing distributional national accounts: first attempt to estimate a joint distribution for income and wealth for the euro area

11/04/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

In recent years, projects have sought to embed distributional aspects within national accounts, with household distributional information set to feature in the next System of National Accounts. There is growing emphasis on capturing all material dimensions of welfare—income, consumption, and wealth—at both macro and micro levels within a unified framework.

Banking on assumptions? How banks model deposit maturities

11/03/2025 European Central Bank Central banks

How do banks manage the behavioural maturity of non-maturing deposits (NMDs)? Using a rich and confidential dataset, we investigate how banks model deposit maturities based on internal assumptions. Although NMDs are contractually floating-rate liabilities with zero maturity, banks reallocate them across different maturity buckets using models that reflect past customer behaviour. Notably, only 20% of NMDs are treated as having zero maturity, while about 10% are assigned maturities beyond seven years. We assess whether these modelling assumptions align with banks’ deposit structures.

FEDS Paper: Declining Search Frictions, Unemployment, and Growth Revisited

10/31/2025 Federal Reserve Central banks

Juan Carlos Córdoba, Anni T. Isojärvi, and Haoran LiThis paper revisits the conditions under which search models generate balanced growth paths (BGPs)—equilibria where unemployment, vacancies, and job flows remain steady as search frictions decline. Martellini and Menzio (2020) claim that such paths exist only when matches are “inspection goods” and match quality follows a Pareto distribution. We show that these conditions are sufficient but not necessary.

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