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Report
Resolving “Too Big to Fail”
Using a synthetic control research design, we find that ?living will? regulation increases a bank?s annual cost of capital by 22 basis points, or 10 percent of total funding costs. This effect is stronger in banks that were measured as systemically important before the regulation?s announcement. We interpret our findings as a reduction in ?too big to fail? subsidies. The size of this effect is large: a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies a subsidy reduction of $42 billion annually. The impact on equity costs drives the main effect. The impact on deposit costs is statistically ...
Working Paper
The Incredible Taylor Principle
This note addresses the role of the Taylor principle to solve the indeterminacy of equilibria in economies in which the monetary authority follows an interest rate rule. We first study the role of imposing two additional ad-hoc restrictions on the definition of equilibrium. Imposing the equilibrium to be locally unique never delivers a unique outcome. Imposing the equilibrium to be bounded, renders the outcome unique only if the inflation target is the Friedman rule. Second, we show that the Taylor principle is strongly time inconsistent - in a sense we make very precise - and that policies ...
Working Paper
Federal Reserve Structure and the Production of Monetary Policy Ideas
We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary policy over the 1960 - 2000 period. We document the introduction of monetarism, rational expectations, credibility, transparency, and other monetary policy ideas by Reserve Banks into the Federal Reserve System. We argue that the Reserve Banks were willing to support and develop new ideas due to internal reforms to the FOMC that Chairman William McChesney Martin implemented in the 1950s and the increased ties with academia that developed in this period. ...
Working Paper
Reputation and Liquidity Traps
Can the central bank credibly commit to keeping the nominal interest rate low for an extended period of time in the aftermath of a deep recession? By analyzing credible plans in a sticky-price economy with occasionally binding zero lower bound constraints, I find that the answer is yes if contractionary shocks hit the economy with sufficient frequency. In the best credible plan, if the central bank reneges on the promise of low policy rates, it will lose reputation and the private sector will not believe such promises in future recessions. When the shock hits the economy sufficiently ...
Working Paper
On Monetary Policy, Model Uncertainty, and Credibility
This paper studies the design of optimal time-consistent monetary policy in an economy where the planner and a representative household are faced with model uncertainty: While they are able to construct and agree on a reference model (probability distribution) governing the evolution of the exogenous state of the economy, a representative household has fragile beliefs and is averse to model uncertainty. In such environments, management of households' expectations becomes an active channel of optimal policymaking per se. A central banker who respects the fact that private sector models are ...
Report
Optimal Capital Taxation Revisited
We revisit the question of how capital should be taxed. We allow for a rich set of tax instruments that consists of taxes widely used in practice, including consumption, dividend, capital, and labor income taxes. We restrict policies to respect promises that the government has made in the previous period regarding the current value of wealth. We show that capital should not be taxed if households have preferences that are standard in the macroeconomics literature. We show that Ramsey outcomes that must respect such promises are time consistent. We show that the presumption in the literature ...
Working Paper
Continuous Markov equilibria with quasi-geometric discounting
We prove that the standard quasi-geometric discounting model used in dynamic consumer theory and political economics does not possess continuous Markov perfect equilibria (MPE) if there is a strictly positive lower bound on wealth. We also show that, at points of discontinuity, the decision maker strictly prefers lotteries over the next period's assets. We then extend the standard model to have lotteries and establish the existence of an MPE with continuous decision rules. The models with and without lotteries are numerically compared, and it is shown that the model with lotteries behaves ...
Working Paper
Origins of Too-Big-to-Fail Policy
This paper traces the origin of the too-big-to-fail problem in banking to the bailout of the $1.2 billion Bank of the Commonwealth in 1972. It describes this bailout and those of subsequent banks through that of Continental Illinois in 1984. Motivations behind the bailouts are described with a particular emphasis on those provided by Irvine Sprague in his book Bailout. During this period, market concentration due to interstate banking restrictions is a factor in most of the bailouts, and systemic risk concerns were raised to justify the bailouts of surprisingly small banks. Sprague?s ...
Working Paper
Optimal monetary policy under model uncertainty without commitment
This paper studies the design of optimal time-consistent monetary policy in an economy where the planner trusts its own model, while a representative household uses a set of alternative probability distributions governing the evolution of the exogenous state of the economy. In such environments, unlike in the original studies of time-consistent monetary policy, managing households' expectations becomes an active channel of optimal policymaking per se, a feature that the paternalistic government seeks to exploit. We adapt recursive methods in the spirit of Abreu, Pearce, and Stacchetti (1990) ...
Working Paper
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection
We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. Using a mechanism-design approach, we solve for the optimal protection policy that induces the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) the optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information, (ii) the optimal protection policy is ...