The paper derives optimal capital requirements, when the bank’s quality is private information. The supervisor can inspect the bank and punish the undercapitalized one with recapitalization and downsizing. The cost of bank’s capital and its ability to sell its assets are crucial for the...

Large banking organizations in the U.S. hold significantly more equity capital than the minimum required by bank regulators. This capital cushion has built up during a period of unusual profitability for the banking system, leading some observers to argue that the capital merely reflects recent...

This paper studies the time variation of the Federal Reserve’s inflation target between 1960 and 2004 using both macro and yield curve data. I estimate a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which the inflation target follows a random-walk process. I compare estimation...

We determine optimal monetary policy under commitment in a forward-looking New Keynesian model when nominal interest rates are bounded below by zero. The lower bound represents an occasionally binding constraint that causes the model and optimal policy to be nonlinear. A calibration to the U.S....