en Daniel Beltran and Canlin Li

We develop a rich demand system framework to quantify the yield effects of shifts in U.S. Treasury supply and demand. Our model captures time-varying holdings shares and estimates sectoral demand elasticities using instrumental variables. We find that the Treasury market has become increasingly price-sensitive over time, driven by the declining participation of less price-sensitive foreign official investors and the rising role of more price-sensitive hedge funds and other private investors. A $100 billion increase in Treasury supply currently raises five-year yields by approximately 3 basis points. We validate the model by showing that the shifts in investor base explain a significant portion of historical yield changes. Our framework provides a flexible tool for policy analysis and counterfactual scenarios, including the yield effects of foreign official investor sales and Federal Reserve balance sheet policies.]]> IFDP Paper Hyunseung Oh, and Choongryul Yang

We study an income-account channel of exchange-rate transmission using matched data on Japanese multinational parents and their foreign affiliates. During the sharp yen depreciation of 2021–22, we find that (i) foreign affiliates with greater exchange-rate exposure expanded their activity and generated more profits, with larger payments to their Japanese parents, and (ii) more exposed parents increased their average wages and shifted employment toward commercial branches and offices involved in sales, purchasing, and related business functions, with offsetting declines in other employment. A multinational firm model in which scarce parent-side support inputs are allocated between domestic operations and foreign affiliates rationalizes these findings. To study the aggregate implications, we embed this mechanism in a two-country general-equilibrium model with trade and multinational production. The model shows that moving foreign-market activity from exports to affiliate production reduces the domestic real GDP response to depreciation and shifts more of the external adjustment from trade and toward income earned abroad. Depreciation therefore need not generate a large expansion in domestic production.]]> IFDP Paper Albert Queralto

We study how increased uncertainty about U.S. asset returns affects global asset prices and exchange rates in a two-country model with intermediary balance-sheet constraints. Empirically, uncertainty shocks widen global credit spreads, appreciate the dollar, and increase currency risk premia. In our model, higher uncertainty tightens intermediary constraints and lowers asset prices, reversing the counterfactual asset price increase in frictionless models. Because constraints make net worth especially valuable in bad times, risk premia respond strongly to uncertainty shocks. This interaction allows the model to match the credit spread, currency premium, and dollar responses in the data.]]> IFDP Paper Martin Bodenstein and Junzhu Zhao

We investigate Barro's random walk hypothesis according to which distortionary labor taxes should follow a random walk for any stochastic process of government expenditures, see Barro (1979). When agents experience cognitive discounting as in Gabaix (2020), they perceive government debt as wealth, and the random walk result breaks down except for knife-edge combinations of limited rationality by policymakers and the private sector. For these specific parameter values, the result can reemerge, but minor deviations from these knife-edge combinations lead to stationary equilibrium dynamics, reflecting the wealth effect of government debt. However, the dynamics turn explosive when policymakers discount the future excessively. Our results extend to other models with limited foresight such as Blanchard (1985), Weil (1989), or Woodford (2019).]]> IFDP Paper Colin Caines, Florian Hoffmann, Gueorgui Kambourov

We document a strong, positive relationship between occupational problem complexity, measured from US data on problem-solving requirements, and occupational wage growth since 1980. In contrast, employment shifts toward more complex occupations have been modest, suggesting a race between the demand for and supply of complex skills. We rationalize these findings by formulating and structurally estimating a quantitative general equilibrium model on the granular occupational level. In our model, workers have heterogeneous comparative advantages in solving complex problems and physical capital admits capital-skill complementarity in occupation space. The equilibrium features Positive Assortative Matching of worker skills to occupational problem complexity, and the model quantitatively explains the evolution of the occupational wage- and employment structure over the last four decades. The model estimates uncover two distinct periods of technological change. Until around 2000, rising complexity premia were driven by capital-skill complementarity and declining equipment capital prices. Post-2000 patterns reflect supply-side technological change whereby occupations became more efficient in utilizing worker skills for complex problem-solving. Our framework helps unify distinct approaches to studying task automation and task augmentation on the one hand and skill-biased technological change on the other.]]> IFDP Paper Sai Ma, Viktors Stebunovs, Judit Temesvary

We develop a Transmission Growth-at-Risk (TGaR) framework that incorporates foreign financial vulnerabilities as predictors of U.S. downside growth risk. We distinguish financial conditions, which measure current tightness in credit markets, from financial vulnerabilities, which measure structural fragilities that can amplify shocks. Elevated foreign financial vulnerabilities are associated with lower U.S. growth-at-risk, with transmission through both trade linkages and dollar integration channels. Asset valuation pressures and financial sector leverage abroad have the largest estimated amplification effects. Financial conditions primarily affect near-term tail risk, while foreign vulnerabilities weigh on U.S. GDP at a medium-term horizon. Out of sample, adding foreign vulnerabilities raises the predictive score by 53 percent at the 8-quarter horizon. Crisis-episode evidence points to the same interpretation. These findings show that monitoring foreign financial vulnerabilities is important for gauging U.S. growth prospects.]]> IFDP Paper Cody Kallen

A substantial portion of corporate debt remains hidden from balance sheets. I document two forms of off-balance-sheet leverage in nonfinancial corporations: operating leases (pre-2019) and intraperiod borrowing—short-term debt issued and repaid within reporting periods, which I am the first to study in nonfinancial firms. Approximately 29 percent of publicly traded firms used substantial operating leases and 12 percent show evidence of substantial intra-period borrowing, with a disproportionate subset using both types of hidden debt. Firms using substantial hidden leverage are generally smaller, more reliant on short-term funding, are less monitored by sophisticated market participants, and report lower leverage, suggesting they use off-balance-sheet debt to project false leverage profiles. When accounting changes in 2019 revealed substantial operating leases, affected firms subsequently cut capital expenditures by 25 percent and R&D by 14 percent, faced heightened risks of executive turnover and stakeholder scrutiny, and experienced more frequent accounting problems. Critically, revelation of substantial operating leases caused these exposed firms to curtail their intra-period borrowing and to raise their reported non-lease leverage.]]> IFDP Paper Giuseppe Fiori, and Damian Pierri

We develop a business cycle model with perfectly competitive product and labor markets in which production requires a minimum labor input, generating endogenous capacity utilization. The aggregate production function is kinked, featuring constant returns to scale below capacity—typically in recessions—and decreasing returns at capacity in expansions. Motivated by new empirical evidence that narratively identified labor tax shocks have significantly larger effects on hours and output when capacity utilization is below trend, we calibrate the model to U.S. data and show that the aggregate hours elasticity is higher in recessions, differing markedly from the micro elasticity implied by preferences.]]> IFDP Paper Marcos Mac Mullen

I study the international transmission of fiscal policy and its impact on the real exchange rate (RER) and net exports. I document that periods of high government debt are strongly associated with a depreciated RER and subsequent increases in net exports. I present causal evidence that debt-financed fiscal expansions transmit primarily through deviations from uncovered interest parity, leading to a depreciated RER and increases in net exports over time. I propose a model in which portfolio rebalancing frictions drive the international transmission of fiscal policy that explains the empirical evidence, and show that this mechanism generates dynamics consistent with the RER disconnect.]]> IFDP Paper Sai Ma

Using microdata from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we study how within-household reallocations of attention across news affect inflation expectation bias, measured relative to a real-time, machine-learning full-information benchmark. Shifting attention toward unfavorable (favorable) economic news increases (decreases) forecast bias substantially, while dropping attention to an unfavorable topic has little effect. The largest bias increases come not from inflation news itself, but from attention to unfavorable social, political, and geopolitical narratives. Aggregate news sentiment has no effect on bias when a household's reported attention allocation is unchanged. In aggregate, these effects are amplified when the attention network is dominated by an unfavorable focal hub: bias-reducing favorable narratives are crowded out of limited attention sets, and respondents closer to the hub exhibit larger bias increases. We find that past and present attention to news together account for up to 70 percent of observed forecast bias, with the current attention component rising sharply during recessions and large negative news events. Results are robust to a battery of specification checks and external validation.]]> IFDP Paper Andrew H. McCallum

We study tariffs in a general equilibrium dynamic model with search frictions between heterogeneous exporting producers and importing retailers. We show the model has a unique equilibrium and analytically characterize home unilateral import tariffs that maximize welfare given a passive foreign country. Search frictions add two terms to the standard optimal tariff expression: One lowers tariffs when contact rates are low; another when private export costs exceed social opportunity costs. Search frictions also introduce new incentives to subsidize imports due to market thickness effects. We calibrate our baseline to U.S. and Chinese 2016 data. We compare this baseline to a counterfactual with international search costs reduced to domestic levels but with all other parameters fixed. We find that higher baseline search costs reduce optimal U.S. unilateral and Nash tariffs and attenuate welfare responses to tariff changes.]]> IFDP Paper Johannes Fleck, Keith Richards

We show that the EU’s 2018 retaliation against US steel and aluminum tariffs targeted goods with low US import dependence and high substitutability. For the majority of tariffed goods, the US share of EU imports declined notably and remained below pre-2018 levels even after the retaliatory tariffs were lifted, reflecting asymmetric effects of tariffs on trade diversion. Moreover, although the retaliatory tariffs were instantly and fully passed through to EU importers, the retaliation did not lead to domestic price pressures as we find no evidence for inflationary effects on consumer and producer prices.]]> IFDP Paper Dario Caldara, Haroon Mumtaz, and Molin Zhong

We characterize asymmetric tail risk across over one hundred U.S. macroeconomic and financial variables using a dynamic factor model with stochastic volatility. The model unifies growth-at-risk, inflation-at-risk, and sectoral heterogeneity through common factors whose volatility responds endogenously to shocks, combined with heterogeneous factor loadings. We find that asymmetric tail risk is pervasive and heterogeneous: some sectors exhibit severe asymmetry while others show minimal asymmetry, with variation across activity, price, and financial variables. The framework disentangles supply- and demand-driven tail risk dynamics, revealing how the balance of risks shifts across episodes, and identifies where vulnerabilities concentrate across the economy.]]> IFDP Paper Nils Gornemann, Eugenio Rojas, Felipe Saffie

Does global financial risk affect long-run growth? Using a panel state-space model for emerging and advanced small open economies, we measure the effects of U.S. monetary policy uncertainty shocks. A one-standard-deviation shock lowers the level of the stochastic trend in emerging markets by at least 25 basis points after three years, with little effect in advanced economies. A small open economy model with growth through innovation and occasionally binding borrowing constraints explains this heterogeneity: higher interest-rate volatility depresses valuations, tightens collateral constraints, and slows innovation in equilibrium. A novel interaction between the occasionally binding constraint and stochastic volatility is key for our results.]]> IFDP Paper Danilo Cascaldi-Garcia and Matteo Iacoviello

We construct a news-based index of deregulation for the United States from 1960 through 2025 using AI to semantically classify newspaper articles. We distinguish articles discussing deregulation from those discussing increased regulation, assigning intensity scores that reflect both the centrality of deregulatory content and whether articles discuss advocacy, proposals, or enacted measures. Human validation confirms strong agreement between AI and human classifications. The deregulation index captures major reform episodes including transportation and telecommunications liberalization in the 1970s--1980s, financial deregulation in the 1980s-1990s, and recent deregulatory activity. We decompose the index by sector, type of deregulation, and policy stage. We validate the news-based index against a parallel index constructed using Federal Register documents: the news-based index leads the Federal Register index by nearly one year, consistent with media coverage reflecting policy intentions before formal implementation. Unlike measures based on detailed statutory coding or Federal Register counts that weigh all rules equally, our approach covers the entire economy and weighs naturally by newsworthiness, capturing regulatory shifts before they materialize in law. Positive shocks to deregulation boost investment, productivity, stock prices, profits, and GDP. Industry-specific deregulation shocks boost industry-level stock returns, consistent with our finding that deregulation involves measures that may impact incumbent profitability and operational efficiency more than competitive entry.]]> IFDP Paper