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 uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business...

This paper develops a framework to study the interaction between banking, price dynamics, and monetary policy. Deposit contracts are written in nominal terms: if prices unexpectedly fall, the real value of banks' existing obligations increases. Banks default, panics precipitate, economic...

The 2007-2009 recession is characterized by: a large drop in employment, an unprecedented decline in firm entry, and a slow recovery. Using confidential firm-level data, I show that financial constraints reduced employment growth in small relative to large firms by 4.8 to 10.5 percentage points....

We examine the impact of banks' liquidity risk management on secondary loan sales. We track the dynamics of bank loan share ownership in the secondary market using data from the Shared National Credit Program, a credit register of syndicated bank loans administered by U.S. regulators. We analyze...

We quantify the effect of refinancing risk on euro area money market spreads, a major factor driving spreads during the financing crisis. With the advent of the crisis, market participants' perception of their ability to refinance over a given period of time changed radically. As a result,...

We examine the impact of banks' liquidity risk management on secondary loan sales. We track the dynamics of bank loan share ownership in the secondary market using data from the Shared National Credit Program, a credit register of syndicated bank loans administered by U.S. regulators. We analyze...

We study the performance and behavior of Value at Risk (VaR) measures used by a number of large banks during and before the financial crisis. Alternative benchmark VaR measures, including GARCH-based measures, are also estimated directly from the banks' trading revenues and help to explain the...

Using data on a broad set of European firms, we find a strong positive relationship between the use of external financing and future productivity (TFP) growth within firms. This relationship is robust to various measures of financing and productivity, and strengthens as financing costs increase....