As derivatives markets have grown, thescope of financial intermediation hasevolved beyond credit intermediation tocover a wide variety of risks. Financialderivatives allow dealers to intermediate the risk managementneeds of their customers by unbundling customerexposures and reallocating them...

[...]This article significantly advances the literature onmortgage prepayments by introducing quantitative measuresof individual homeowner credit histories to the loan-levelanalysis of the factors influencing the probability that a homeownerwill refinance. In addition to credit histories, we...

[...]Derivatives contracts are especially efficient vehiclesfor unbundling the price risks embodied in assets andliabilities.2 The contracts allow users to trade away therisks they do not wish to be exposed to while retainingother risk exposures. For example, in a financing relationshipbetween a...

This paper discusses the problems that arise from interest subsidies in the UK system of student loans; systems in other countries, for example Australia and New Zealand, face similar problems. The topic appears to be narrow and technical, and of significance only to the most nerdy of...

We empirically analyse the appropriateness of indexing emerging market sovereign debt to USreal interest rates. We find that policy-induced exogenous increases in US rates raise default riskin emerging market economies, as hypothesised in the theoretical literature. However, we also findevidence...

We describe a behavior of a central bank when its measures of current inflation and outputare subject to measurement errors, in a framework of optimizing models with nominal pricestickiness. In our model, a central bank sets the interest rate equal to its current estimate of theso-called...

Monetary policy has traditionally been viewed as theprocess by which a central bank uses its influence overthe supply of money to promote its economic objectives. Forexample, Milton Friedman (1959, p. 24) defined the tools ofmonetary policy to be those “powers that enable the [FederalReserve]...

This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 derived from diffusionindices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economicactivity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which isreversed after...

We propose a theory of exchange rate determination under interestrate rules in a two-country model. We first show that simpleinterest rate feedback rules can determine a unique and stableequilibrium without any explicit reaction to the nominal exchangerate.We characterize how the behavior of the...