The paper presents the results of research conducted as part of the American Enterprise Institute's project on financial services regulation. It is a revision of a paper that later appeared in a volume providing a comprehensive review of financial regulatory policy entitled, Restructuring...

The U.S. financial system has changed significantly over the last several decades without any major structural changes to the decentralized financial regulatory system, despite numerous proposals. In the past decade, many countries have chosen to consolidate their regulators into a newly formed...

This paper embeds two key ideas about the nature of financial innovation taken from the empirical literature into a familiar equilibrium monetary model. It provides formal support for several alternative econometric specifications for money demand that attempt to capture the effects of financial...

The paper assesses the role of a Reserve Bank in the Federal Reserve System. It compares the Eurosystem with the Fed System, and offers suggestions for the Eurosystem based on the Fed's experience. A regional presence facilitates surveillance of the economy and helps a central bank to...

Laws requiring banks to hold a volume of reserves equal to a prescribed fraction of their deposits originated in this country more than a century ago. Since then both the financial system and the rationales supporting reserve requirements have changed considerably. Nevertheless, the practice of...

The 1920s and 1930s saw the Fed reject a state-of-the-art empirical policy framework for a logically defective one. Consisting of a quantity theoretic analysis of the business cycle, the former framework featured the money stock, price level, and real interest rates as policy indicators. By...

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the way in which current institutional arrangements shape the character of monetary policy. It is emphasized that the Fed, in order to preserve its independence, formulates monetary policy in a way that prevents the formation of coalitions within the...

The disadvantages or "costs" associated with membership in the Federal Reserve System, apparently increasing in recent years, have resulted in many existing banks withdrawing from the system and a large majority of organizing banks choosing nonmember status.

Using data compiled from concentrated residential urban revitalization programs implemented in Richmond, VA, between 1999 and 2004, we study residential externalities. Specifically, we provide evidence that in neighborhoods targeted by the programs, sites that did not directly benefit from...