Search Results
Journal Article
The burden of debt
Journal Article
Monetary policy and learning: Some implications for policy and research
In March 2003 the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta hosted a conference focusing on the relationship between monetary policy and learning. The conference papers and discussions are part of an emerging literature that introduces learning-about the economy or the model used by policymakers-into dynamic macroeconomic models. In some models, monetary policymakers learn about how the economy works while in others private agents learn about the model(s) the central bank uses to formulate monetary policy. ; This article outlines key issues, raised in a 1999 book by Thomas Sargent, about how to ...
Working Paper
Too-Big-to-Fail before the Fed
?Too-big-to-fail? is consistent with policies followed by private bank clearing houses during financial crises in the U.S. National Banking Era prior to the existence of the Federal Reserve System. Private bank clearing houses provided emergency lending to member banks during financial crises. This behavior strongly suggests that ?too-big-to-fail? is not the problem causing modern crises. Rather, it is a reasonable response to the threat posed to large banks by the vulnerability of short-term debt to runs.
Journal Article
Some unanswered questions about bank panics
Working Paper
Macroeconomic factors and asset excess returns
Working Paper
Clearinghouse access and bank runs: comparing New York and Chicago during the Panic of 1907
During the Panic of 1907, New York City trust companies were not members of the New York Clearinghouse whereas trust companies in Chicago were members of the Chicago Clearinghouse. We argue that the apparent isolation of New York City trust companies from the pool of bank reserves controlled by the New York Clearinghouse led to the large-scale depositor runs on the New York City trusts. In contrast, Chicago trust companies had direct access to the Chicago Clearinghouse and their pool of reserves and did not suffer large-scale depositor withdrawals. Statistical evidence on a cross-section of ...
Working Paper
Business cycles and financial crises: the roles of credit supply and demand shocks
This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to 2010. The sample covers several episodes useful for understanding U.S. economic and financial history, which generate variation in the data that aids in identifying credit supply and demand shocks. We identify these shocks within MS-BVARs by tying credit supply and demand movements to inside money and ...
Journal Article
Monetary explanations of the Great Depression: a selective survey of empirical evidence
Seventy years after the Great Depression, economists still debate the causes of this economic catastrophe. Two leading explanations are distinguished by whether or not the Federal Reserve?s monetary policies are perceived as being chiefly responsible for propagating and magnifying the initial contraction into a depression. ; This article surveys recent modeling efforts and empirical work that examine aggregate explanations for the Great Depression from both the extensive literature using vector autoregression techniques and the more recent literature using dynamic stochastic general ...