Notre Dame economist Jing Cynthia Wu’s paper that details a new model to examine economic effects of unconventional monetary policy in the Euro area has won the Richard Stone Prize in Applied Econometrics from the Journal of Applied Econometrics.
The Dillon Hall Associate Professor in the Department of Economics co-wrote “Negative interest rate policy and the yield curve,” which was published in 2020, with Fan Dora Xia, a senior economist with the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.
The journal awards the prize every two years for the best paper with substantive econometric applications. Econometrics uses economic theory, mathematics, and statistical inference to quantify economic phenomena.
“I felt incredibly honored,” Wu said. “The award has been given out to famous and well-respected economists.”
Wu’s related research on shadow rates also is highly regarded. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and former chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen all have cited her research. And twice she’s been invited to the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium — one of the longest-standing and important central banking conferences in the world.
Since 2018 when she joined Notre Dame, Wu has published nine academic articles, with three more on the way; she’s published 21 total, and they’ve been cited more than 5,000 times on Google Scholar.
In Wu and Xia’s paper, they proposed a new shadow rate term structure model. Different from central banks’ policy rates, the shadow rates can be negative, which keeps economic models functional when a central bank’s interest rate is 0 percent.
“It fits into the research agenda Dora and I have to create shadow policy rates for different countries when the actual policy rates are at the zero lower bound,” said Wu, a macroeconomist whose research is at the intersection of monetary economics and financial markets.
“The shadow rate is useful to summarize monetary policy stance, especially for unconventional monetary policy, such as quantitative easing [monetary policy in which a central bank purchases securities from the open market to reduce interest rates and increase the money supply].”
