A history of the changes in the theory of the role of the lender of last resort--as a source of solvency versus liquidity support--and a discussion of the distinction between necessity and convenience (the American and European versions of lender of last resort theory) in mounting rescue...

A history of the evolution of political economy models in the early 1930s--crucial years of change in the supervision and regulation of the financial industry--outlining the policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, the change of focus in the Federal Reserve Board from...

The United States all but abandoned its foreign-exchange-market intervention operations in late 1995, when they proved corrosive to the credibility of the Federal Reserve?s commitment to price stability. We view this decision as the culmination of the evolution of U.S. monetary policy over the...

An argument that variations of extant general-equilibrium monetary models can generate real-time economic forecasts comparable in accuracy to those contained in the Federal Reserve Board's "Greenbook" briefing documents.

Attitudes about foreign-exchange-market intervention in the United States evolved in tandem with views about monetary policy as policy makers grappled with the perennial problem of having more economic objectives than independent instruments with which to achieve them. This paper—the...

This paper considers the implications of a decreasing demand for cash transactions under several monetary policy regimes. A policy of nominal-interest-rate targeting implies that a secular decline in the volume of cash transactions unambiguously leads to accelerating inflation. A policy of...

Loan commitments increase a bank's risk by obligating it to issue future loans under terms that it might otherwise refuse. However, moral hazard and adverse selection problems potentially may result in these contracts being rationed or sorted. Depending on the relative risks of the borrowers who...

A documentation of some recent changes in the market for loan sales, using a tobit model to relate quantities of loans bought and sold to bank size, capital, risk, and funding mode.

We present a series of stylized facts about gross loan flows and how they vary over time, bank size, and region. We define loan creation as the sum of the change in bank loans at all banks that increased loans since last quarter. Loan destruction is similarly defined as the absolute value of the...

The purpose of this study is to empirically analyze if loan loss provisioning is forward-looking. Using a confidential dataset that directly helps us identify loan demand and loan supply at the bank level, we test if the banks’ provisioning behavior is different before and after the crisis. We...