We document sectoral differences in changes in output, hours worked, prices, and nominal wages in the United States during the Great Depression. We explore whether contractionary monetary shocks combined with different degrees of nominal wage frictions across sectors are consistent with both...

The authors seek to measure the potential benefit of reducing the likelihood of economic crises (defined as Depression-style collapses of economic activity). Based on the observed frequency of Depression-like events, they estimate this likelihood to be approximately one in every 83 years for the...

The authors evaluate the Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis--that a more accommodative monetary policy could have greatly reduced the severity of the Great Depression. To do this, they first estimate a dynamic, general equilibrium model using data from the 1920s and 1930s. Although the model includes...

In this paper I revisit the debate on the impact of bank and market characteristics on the rigidity of retail bank interest rates. Whereas existing research in this area has been exclusively concerned with static measures of bank and market structure, I adopt a dynamic approach which explores...

We use bank retail interest rates as price examples in a study of the determinants of price durations. The extraordinary richness of the data allows us to address some major open issues from the price rigidity literature, such as the functional form of the hazard of changing a price, the effect...

An examination of banks' optimal deposit-rate-setting behavior when some customers have limited recall, showing that when banks exploit this phenomenon, deposit rates will tend to be set at round fractions and will be relatively "sticky" at these levels.

Despite extensive research interest in the last decade, the banking literature has not reached a consensus on the impact of bank mergers on deposit rates. In particular, results on the dynamics of deposit rates surrounding bank mergers vary substantially across studies. In this paper, we aim for...

This paper presents an empirical examination of the effects of both deposit market competition and of wholesale funding on bank risk simultaneously. The traditional view of the relation between competition and risk has focused on the disciplining role of the charter value. In this project we...