More Than Words: Fed Chairs’ Communication During Congressional Testimonies, joint with Michelle Alexopoulos, Xinfen Han, Oleksiy Kryvtsov, Journal of Monetary Economics, March 2024 

 How Do People View Price and Wage Inflation? joint with Monica Jain, Olena Kostyshyna, Forthcoming in Journal of Monetary Economics

Extreme Weather and Low-Income Household Finance: Evidence from Payday Loans, joint with Shihan Xie, Wenxin Xie

Evaluating the Effects of Forward Guidance and Large-scale Asset Purchases

This paper evaluates the effects of forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) when the nominal interest rate reaches the zero lower bound. I first study the two policies in a dynamic new Keynesian model with financial frictions. I then match the change that the model predicts would arise from a linear combination of the two shocks with the observed change in the entire yield curve in a 30-minute window around Federal Reserve announcements, allowing me to identify the separate contributions of each shock. My estimates imply that LSAP was more important in influencing output and inflation than forward guidance.

A new measure of monetary policy shocks   [Data]

I propose a new method to construct a monetary policy shock on Federal Reserve announcement days which combines the high-frequency multidimensional approach of Gurkaynak et al.  (2005) with Greenbook measures of the Fed’s information set as in Romer and Romer (2004). I provide substantial evidence that the new monetary policy shock is consistent with workhorse macroeconomic models’ predictions for a structural monetary policy shock. The shock has large and highly statistically significant instantaneous effects on the Treasury yield curve. Using the shock as an external instrument in a VAR analysis, I find that contractionary monetary policy has modest downward effects on both output and inflation over the business-cycle frequencies.