Search Results
Journal Article
Currency design in the United States and abroad: counterfeit deterrence and visual accessibility
Despite the increasing use of electronic payments, currency retains an important role in the payment system of every country. In this article, the authors compare and contrast trade-offs among currency design features, including those primarily intended to deter counterfeiting and those to improve usability by the visually impaired. The authors conclude that periodic changes in the design of currency are an important aspect of counterfeit deterrence and that currency designers worldwide generally have been successful in efforts to deter counterfeiting. At the same time, currency designers ...
Journal Article
Replicability, real-time data, and the science of economic research: FRED, ALFRED, and VDC
This article discusses the linkages between two recent themes in economic research: "real time" data and replication. These two themes share many of the same ideas, specifically, that scientific research itself has a time dimension. In research using real-time data, this time dimension is the date on which particular observations, or pieces of data, became available. In work with replication, it is the date on which a study (and its results) became available to other researchers and/or was published. Recognition of both dimensions of scientific research is important. A project at the ...
Journal Article
U.S. currency at home and abroad
Journal Article
Doubling your monetary base and surviving: some international experience
The authors examine the experience of selected central banks that have used large-scale balance-sheet expansion, frequently referred to as ?quantitative easing,? as a monetary policy instrument. The case studies focus on central banks responding to the recent financial crisis and Nordic central banks during the banking crises of the 1990s; others are provided for comparison purposes. The authors conclude that large-scale balance-sheet increases are a viable monetary policy tool provided the public believes the increase will be appropriately reversed.
Journal Article
Meeting the Y2K demand for base money
Journal Article
Retail sweep programs and money demand
Journal Article
Whither the New Economy?
Journal Article
Real output in Switzerland: new estimates for 1914-47
In this article, Felix A, Andrist, Richard G. Anderson, and Marcela Williams provide, for the first time, an estimate of the real gross domestic product of Switzerland between 1914 and 1947. The estimate is obtained from published data on three other measures of Swiss economic activity during this period: net national product, industrial production, and the transport volume of Swiss railroads. These underlying series closely represent the economic growth of Switzerland; but, they also seem unreasonably volatile as proxy measures of total production, and hence, are filtered by moving averages. ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy's third interest rate
Journal Article
How low can you go? negative interest rates and investors’ flight to safety
It is not uncommon to observe negative interest rates during uncertain times, when investors flee to safety. But the existence of negative market yields provides no support for policies in which central banks set negative interest rates on deposits held at a central bank.