Employment Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy: Evidence from QE

Stephan Luck and Tom Zimmermann

No 2018-071, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy on employment via a bank lending channel. We find that banks with higher mortgage-backed securities holdings issued relatively more loans after the first and third rounds of quantitative easing (QE1 and QE3). While additional volume is concentrated in refinanced mortgages after QE1, increases are driven by newly originated home purchase mortgages and additional commercial and industrial lending after QE3. Using spatial variation, we show that regions with a high share of affected banks experienced stronger employment growth after both, QE1 and QE3. While the ability of households to refinance mortgages after QE1 spurred local demand, the resulting additional employment growth was relatively weak and confined to the non-tradable goods sector. In contrast, the increase in overall employment after QE3 is sizable and can be attributed to the supply of additional credit to firms. To s upport this finding, we use new confidential loan-level data to show that firms with stronger ties to affected banks increased employment and capital investment more after QE3. Altogether, our findings suggest that unconventional monetary policy can, similar to conventional monetary policy, affect real economic outcomes.

Keywords: Bank Lending; Central Banking; Employment; Financial Crisis; Quantitative Easing; Real Effects; Unconventional Monetary Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E00 E4 E5 G00 G21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 78 pages
Date: 2018-10-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018071pap.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Employment effects of unconventional monetary policy: Evidence from QE (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2018-71

DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2018.071

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