A model is constructed in which consumers and banks have incentives to fake the quality of collateral. Conventional monetary easing can exacerbate these problems, in that the mispresentation of collateral becomes more profitable, thus increasing haircuts and interest rate differentials. Central...

Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

This paper examines the stimulative effect of central bank forward guidance—the promise to keep future policy rates lower than its policy rule suggests—when the short-term nominal interest rate is stuck at its zero lower bound (ZLB).We utilize a standard New Keynesian model in which forward...

The 1950s are often pointed to as a decade in which the Federal Reserve operated a particularly successful monetary policy. The present paper examines the evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy from the mid-1930s through the 1950s in an effort to understand better the apparent success of...

This paper develops an analytically tractable Bewley model of money demand to shed light on some important questions in monetary theory, such as the welfare cost of inflation. It is shown that when money is a vital form of liquidity to meet uncertain consumption needs, the welfare costs of...

Many forecasts are conditional in nature. For example, a number of central banks routinely report forecasts conditional on particular paths of policy instruments. Even though conditional forecasting is common, there has been little work on methods for evaluating conditional forecasts. This paper...

We investigate the role of jumps in transmitting volatility between foreign exchange markets (Engle, Ito, and Lin, 1990; Melvin and Peiers Melvin, 2003; Cai, Howorka, and Wongswan, 2008). We show that recently developed estimators have very different implications for the impact of jumps on exchange rate...

We identify financial stress regimes using a model that explicitly links financial variables with the macroeconomy. The financial stress regimes are identified using a large unbalanced panel of financial variables with an embedded method for variable selection and, empirically, are strongly...

In the wake of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate target essentially to zero and resorted to unconventional monetary policy. With the nominal FFR constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB) for an extended period, empirical monetary models cannot be estimated...