Felix Ward

Maritime disasters in the Spanish Empire (1531-1810) resulted in the loss of substantial amounts of silver money. We exploit this recurring natural experiment to estimate the effect that an exogenous change in the money supply has on the real economy. We find that negative money supply shocks caused Spanish real output to decline. A transmission channel analysis highlights slow price adjustments and credit frictions as channels through which money supply changes affected the real economy. Especially large output declines occurred in textile manufacturing against the backdrop of a credit crunch that impaired merchants’ ability to supply their manufacturers with inputs.

(Cato Institute Research Brief)

Can central banks defuse rising stability risks in financial booms by leaning against the wind with higher interest rates? This paper studies the state-dependent effects of monetary policy on financial crisis risk. Based on the near-universe of advanced economy financial cycles since the 19th century, we show that discretionary leaning against the wind policies during credit and asset price booms are more likely to trigger crises than prevent them.

(CESifo Working Paper)(CEPR Discussion Paper)(VOX Column)

How did the Spanish money supply evolve in the aftermath of the discovery of large amounts of precious metals in Spanish America? We synthesize the available data on the mining of precious metals and their international flow to estimate the money supply for Spain from 1492 to 1810. Our estimate suggests that the Spanish money supply increased more than ten-fold. Viewed through the equation of exchange this money supply increase can account for most of the price level rise in early modern Spain.

(Nada es Gratis)

Current account reversals under the Gold Standard (1880-1913) – a fixed exchange rate regime – were accompanied by few, if any, output losses. To understand why, we build and estimate an open economy model of the Gold Standard, which allows us to quantitatively assess the importance of three channels of external adjustment: flexible prices, international migration, and monetary policy. Our first finding is that flexible prices were the most influential channel through which output was stabilized, whereas migration and monetary policy mattered little. Our second finding is that price flexibility was predicated on large primary sectors. Their flexibly priced products dominated the export booms that stabilized output during major external adjustments.

This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is particularly notable. We demonstrate that fluctuations in risk premiums, and not risk-free rates and dividends, account for a large part of the observed equity price synchronization after 1990. We also show that U.S. monetary policy has come to play an important role as a source of fluctuations in risk appetite across global equity markets. These fluctuations are transmitted across both fixed and floating exchange rate regimes, but the effects are more muted in floating rate regimes.

(CEPR Discussion Paper) (NBER Working Paper) (VOX Column)(Bank Underground)

Media coverage: The Economist

This paper introduces classification tree ensembles (CTEs) to the banking crisis forecasting literature. I show that CTEs substantially improve out-of-sample forecasting performance over best-practice early-warning systems. CTEs enable policymakers to correctly forecast 80% of crises with a 20% probability of incorrectly forecasting a crisis. These findings are based on a long-run sample (1870–2011), and two broad post-1970 samples which together cover almost all known systemic banking crises. I show that the marked improvement in forecasting performance results from the combination of many classification trees into an ensemble, and the use of many predictors.