en 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 Hyung Joo Kim and Dong Hwan Oh

Despite documented heterogeneity in volatility dynamics across the option surface, standard implied volatility forecasting models apply homogeneous parameters throughout. We introduce a machine-learning framework that uses regression trees to partition the surface along both moneyness and maturity dimensions, identifying data-driven regions where distinct forecasting models perform best. Extending the Surface Heterogeneous Autoregressive (SHAR) framework of Dufays, Jacobs, and Rombouts (2025), we develop tree-based SHAR specifications that preserve interpretable structure while allowing model parameters to vary across the surface. Empirical analysis using S&P 500 options demonstrates that the boosted tree-based specification achieves the lowest out-of-sample forecast errors across all horizons, reducing one-month-ahead RMSE by 13 percent versus the benchmark SHAR model. The improvements are statistically significant and particularly pronounced during stress periods. The estimated tree presents economically interpretable segmentation: short-dated options exhibit higher daily persistence but lower monthly persistence than long-dated options, while deep out-of-the-money calls or puts display distinct dynamics from near-the-money contracts.]]> FEDS Paper John C. Driscoll, Benjamin S. Kay, Geng Li, and Cindy M. Vojtech

We provide the first lender-level analysis linking two independently constructed credit supply measures: the Federal Reserve's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) and credit card mail offers from Mintel Comperemedia. Using a matched panel of 73 banks from 2000 to 2019, we find that quarterly mail volume growth was 18 percent lower when banks reported tightening credit card lending standards, a relationship robust to including credit demand indicators. In addition, SLOOS responses on credit limits and interest rate spreads are also correlated with these terms observed in mail offers. Our findings validate both measures as informative credit supply indicators.]]> FEDS Paper Luca Guerrieri, Jinill Kim, and Arsenii Mishin

Within narrowly defined industries, the most productive firms produce far more than the least productive from the same inputs, and this dispersion widens in downturns. We build a tractable representative-agent model in which financial frictions—adverse selection and moral hazard—make firms sort endogenously into lenders, strategic defaulters, and producers. As credit conditions vary, the resulting misallocation gives aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) an endogenous component that accounts for about 30 percent of the variance of TFP at business-cycle frequencies, a third of it from strategic default. We show that our tractable model can match key features of the observed distribution of productivity across firms and its co-movement with output growth and credit conditions in the data.]]> FEDS Paper Bence Bardóczy, Akshay Shanker, and Mateo Velásquez-Giraldo

The sequence-space Jacobian (SSJ) method of Auclert et al. (2021a) has made heterogeneous-agent models far easier to solve, fueling an explosion of applications. But even SSJ strains against capacity constraints when state spaces grow very large, as in economies with overlapping generations of heterogeneous agents (HA-OLG). We show how to exploit the special properties of age—finite planning horizons and deterministic transitions between ages—to compute the Jacobians of a general class of HA-OLG models orders of magnitude faster. We provide rigorous proofs, age-specific Jacobians that decompose aggregate dynamics across cohorts, an application to the dynamic general-equilibrium effects of secularly declining birth rates, and an accessible cookbook for adopting our method.]]> FEDS Paper John Coglianese and Jade A. Fang

Researchers are faced with the choice of which of the many recently developed difference-in-differences methods to use in practice. To assess these estimators' relative performance for single-unit event studies, we conduct 134,000+ state-level placebo event studies across 13 estimators. We find that no single method dominates. Performance is context-dependent, with synthetic-control-like methods sometimes outperforming and sometimes underperforming two-way-fixed-effect-like and matching methods. Performance also varies across states at least as much as it does across estimators. Our results highlight the need for practitioners to conduct placebo tests to understand the performance of methods in their research context.]]> FEDS Paper Anthony M. Diercks, Petra Sinagl, and Andrea Tamoni

We study how macroeconomic developments affect asset prices by analyzing the response of equity yields to a well-identified long-run growth shock. Using synthetic equity yield data from Giglio et al. (2024), we show that a positive long-run shock steepens the equity yield curve by increasing expected dividend growth while leaving discount rates largely unchanged. We examine how the investment driving this growth is financed and how yields respond across value and growth firms. Growth-firm yields respond more strongly than value-firm yields, reflecting larger changes in expected dividend growth. Ai et al. (2018)'s model, modified to separate cash dividends from total payout, best matches these responses relative to benchmark equity term structure models.]]> FEDS Paper Douglas Webber, and Mike Zabek

Using novel data from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, we examine how labor market tightness affects workers’ job quality. We estimate that a 10 percent increase in job vacancies not only increases the probability of changing jobs, it yields an 11–18 percent increase in the (unconditional) probability of switching to a better job overall, and one with greater pay and benefits, interest in the work, and advancement opportunities. Because tight labor markets improve both worker pay and job amenities in roughly the same proportion, their benefits to workers are underestimated when based on pay alone.]]> FEDS Paper Luca Guerrieri, and Arsenii Mishin

In a model with endogenous risk-taking, deposit insurance and limited liability may lead banks to make risky loans that are socially inefficient. Capital requirements can prevent excessive risk-taking at the cost of reducing liquidity-producing bank deposits. A policy that sets capital requirements just high enough to prevent excessive risktaking will move capital requirements pro-, counter-, or a-cyclically depending on the shock source. However, such a policy requires full knowledge of all the shocks hitting the economy and is not implementable. Simple rules that respond to cyclical conditions—in line with Basel III guidance—perform poorly, whereas a small static capital buffer can do much better.]]> FEDS Paper Sriya Anbil, Alyssa Anderson, Ethan Cohen, and Romina Ruprecht

We present a new constraint on the size of the Fed’s balance sheet: repo market capacity. Calibrating a structural model to the recent monetary tightening cycle, we show that repo market capacity—driven by money market fund liquidity supply—is the binding constraint on the Fed’s balance sheet, not bank reserve demand, which was highlighted in the events of September 2019. We also demonstrate a novel complementarity between interest rate and balance sheet policies: higher policy rates expand repo capacity, allowing the central bank to operate with a smaller balance sheet.]]> FEDS Paper Andreas Tischbirek

We study the spillovers of large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) in the U.S. on financial intermediation in the euro area using bank-level supervisory data and high-frequency identified policy surprises. Our detailed panel data permit us to trace the impact of LSAPs through bank balance sheets. We find that the Federal Reserve affects credit provision in the euro area through a channel that we refer to as the “international bank capital channel” of unconventional monetary policy. In response to an LSAP shock that leads to a steepening of the U.S. Treasury yield curve, the Treasury positions of euro area banks shrink, capital ratios worsen, and banks that are less well capitalized contract their lending relative to banks that are better capitalized. Our results are consistent with an important role of revaluation effects, imperfect risk hedging, and credit as an adjustment margin for banks in the proximity of regulatory capital constraints.]]> FEDS 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 Erick Sager

Since the 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has reported much more rapid growth in U.S. private sector employer establishments than has the Census Bureau – the gap reached roughly 1.6 million by 2023. Using linked BLS-Census microdata, we document two main drivers. First, a large and growing number of employers providing services to the elderly and persons with disabilities are in scope for the BLS frame but not the Census Bureau’s. Second, many firms appear with substantially more establishments in the BLS frame. These discrepancies substantially affect the measured establishment size distribution and quantitative policy analysis.]]> FEDS Paper Jin-Wook Chang

This paper investigates how settlement speed affects financial stability in payment networks, accounting for netting benefits, liquidity costs, and counterparty risks. Faster settlement reduces crisis likelihood but amplifies crisis severity. The net welfare effect depends on network topology and proximity to default threshold points—settlement times at which the number of defaulting agents changes discontinuously. The optimal settlement speed is not universal: it depends on payment network structure and liquidity conditions. Deteriorating liquidity shifts the optimum toward slower settlement, even when faster settlement reduces counterparty default probability.]]> FEDS Paper Benjamin K. Johannsen

This paper provides an analytic characterization of the speed of convergence under learning to a rational expectations equilibrium (REE) for a large class of multivariate models. We show that learning is slower when people's beliefs about model outcomes are more self-fulfilling. The paper also investigates which features of a model economy make beliefs more self-fulfilling, using variants of the simple new-Keynesian model and a medium-scale DSGE model. For empirically plausible specifications of these models, convergence of a learning equilibrium to the REE is so slow that analysis based on rational expectations can be misleading.]]> FEDS Paper