Our current inflation stemmed from a fiscal shock. The Fed is slow to react. Why? Will the Fed's slow reaction spur more inflation? I write a simple model that encompasses the Fed's mild projections and its slow reaction, and traditional views that inflation will surge without swift rate rises....

The long running debate among economic historians over how long it took regional financial markets in the United States to become fully integrated should be of considerable interest to students of monetary unions. This paper reviews the debate, discusses the implications of various hypotheses...

Financial innovation challenges the foundations of monetary theory, and standard monetary theory has not been very successful at describing the history of U.S. inflation. Motivated by these observations, I ask: Can we understand the history of U.S. inflation using a framework that ignores...

This paper asks whether the vaunted comparative stability of the Canadian banking system has been purchased at the cost of creating an oligopoly. We assembled a data set that compares bank failures, lending rates, interest paid on deposits and related variables over the period 1920 to 1980. Our...