Since January 1994, the Federal Reserve Board has permitted depository institutions in the United States to implement so-called retail sweep programs. The essence of these programs is computer software that dynamically reclassifies customer deposits between transaction accounts, which are...

Recently, there has been considerable interest in identifying the exogenous policy actions of the Fed and a number of identification methods have been proposed. This paper deals with one of these, namely, using nonborrowed reserves in a recursive structural vector autoregression(VAR). A number...

We formulate the central bank's problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income. Households...

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, speculation arose that the Federal Reserve might respond by easing monetary policy. This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to investigate the appropriate monetary policy response to a natural disaster. We show that...

Market interest rates respond to discount rate changes. What is the reason for this response. This paper investigates several competing hypotheses of why markets respond to discount rate changes. Evidence that the response is invariant to changes in the Federal Reserve's operating procedure...

This paper examines the history of Federal Reserve Bank input into Federal Reserve System monetary policymaking. From the Fed's founding in 1914 through the Great Depression, the Reserve Banks held the balance of power. Dissatisfaction with the Fed's performance, however, led to a wholesale...

The deflationary outcome of monetary policy during the Great Depression had two fundamental causes: 1) the Federal Reserve's use of flawed operating guides, and 2) a decision to make preservation of the gold standard the overriding objective of policy. The Great Depression resulted in lasting...

Presented at the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce. February 24, 2011.

March 28, 2012. Presented at Monetary Policy in a Global Setting: China and the United States, Beijing, China.