Volume 12, Issue 2 - Empirical Macroeconomics Using Geographical Data

This special issue of the B. E. Journal of Macroeconomics collects papers presented at a Conference on Empirical Macroeconomics Using Geographical Data, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on March 18, 2011.

This paper exploits differences in the stringency of balanced budget rules across US states to estimate the effect of the cyclicality of fiscal policy on state GDP growth. While most states have passed laws restricting deficits, the nature and strictness of these laws vary greatly. States with more stringent balanced budget restrictions run more procyclical fiscal policy. We use the diversity in these laws as an instrument for the cyclicality of policy. We find evidence that a more counter-cyclical primary deficit increases a state's average growth rate per capita. This effect is robust to a number of alternative specifications. One concrete policy implication of this analysis is that a state could increase its annual growth rate by relaxing its balanced budget restrictions.

Many studies have documented disparities in the regional responses to monetary policy shocks. However, because of computational issues, the literature has often neglected the richest level of disaggregation: the city. In this paper, we estimate the city-level responses to monetary policy shocks in a Bayesian SVAR. The Bayesian SVAR allows us to model the entire panel of metropolitan areas through the imposition of a shrinkage prior. We then seek the origin of the city-level asymmetric responses. We find strong evidence that the population density and the size of the local government sector mitigate the effects of monetary policy on local employment. The roles of the traditional interest rate, equity, and credit channels are marginalized relative to the previous findings based on less-granular definitions of regions. However, the relevance of the interest rate and credit channels appears to be more robust to business cycle uncertainty.

Case, Quigley, and Shiller (2005) persuasively argue that the well-known conceptual difficulties in measuring aggregate “wealth effects” might be lessened by the use of state-level data. Unfortunately, the data required for a convincing implementation of their idea have been either virtually nonexistent (for financial wealth) or of questionable quality (for consumption). Our main contributions are to provide the first directly observed panel data on financial wealth at the state level, and to construct improved measures of state-level spending growth. Using these data, we estimate rudimentary “wealth effects” regressions that find a strong relationship between twice-lagged housing wealth growth and current spending growth, but we find no relationship between lagged financial wealth growth and current spending growth.

Using data from U.S. states, this paper examines empirically how the effects of monetary policy on output depend on banking conditions. I find that when a state’s banking sector starts out with a low capital-asset ratio, its subsequent lending and output growth are both more sensitive to changes in the federal funds rate or other indicators of monetary policy. This result is consistent with the existence of a ‘bank capital channel’ as well as a conventional bank lending channel. Other evidence favors the capital channel, as bank liquidity is not associated with variation in the impact of monetary policy on output at the state level. Consistent with the theory, the importance of state-level measures of bank capital weakens significantly after the removal of regulatory barriers to interstate banking.

This paper uses the staggering timing of branching and interstate banking deregulation as a natural experiment to explore the effect of agency cost on the use of bank loan commitments. A simple inventory-based model shows that lower agency cost allows a bank to issue more loan commitments because lower agency cost alleviates the difficulty of liquidity management associated with loan commitments. Our empirical analysis confirms the model’s testable implication: Commercial banks issue more loan commitments after interstate banking deregulation, which lowers agency costs through expanded internal capital markets across states. However, the effect of branching deregulation is weak or non-existent. Considering the role of bank loan commitments, this result not only shows how banking deregulation affects bank balance sheets but also suggests one route through which interstate banking affects the real economy.