Lack of access to finance is often cited as a key reason why poor people remain poor. This paper uses data on the Indian rural branch expansion program to provide empirial evidence on this issue. Between 1977 and 1990, the Indian Central Bank mandated that a commercial bank can open a branch in...

The standard New Keynesian model suffers from the so-called .macro-micro pricing conflict: in order to match the dynamics of inflation implied by macroeconomic data, the model needs to assume an average duration of price contracts which is much longer than what is observed in micro data. Here I...

I analyze optimal monetary policy in an economy with search and matching frictions in the labor market and staggered nominal wage and price contracts. In this framework, as opposed to the standard New Keynesian model, preset nominal wages need not have any effect on existing employment...

Meltzer (2001b) argues that the current trend for downgrading the role of money in standard macro models is erroneous as it masks those monetary transmission channels which operate through changes in relative yields of assets. This paper shows that the scope of these changes can be empirically...

An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

This paper examines the role of currency and banking in the German financial crisis of 1931 for both Germany and the U.S. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find that monetary transmission through...

This paper analyses the effect of child labor on household labor supply using 1920 US Census micro data. The aim of the analysis is to understand who in the household benefits from child labor. In order to identify a source of exogenous variation in child labor I use State-specific child labor...