This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions had significantly smaller declines in non-tradable...

We study whether the effects of monetary policy are dependent on the demographic structure of the population. We exploit cross-sectional variation in the response of US states to an identified monetary policy shock. We find that there are three distinct age groups. In response to an increase in...

This paper studies a model in which a low monetary policy rate lowers the cost of capital for entrepreneurs, potentially spurring productive investment. Low interest rates, however, also induce entrepreneurs to lever up so as to increase payouts to equity. Whereas such leveraged payouts...

What are the effects of monetary policy on exchange rates? And have unconventional monetary policies changed the way monetary policy is transmitted to international financial markets? According to conventional wisdom, expansionary monetary policy shocks in a country lead to that country's...

The Chinese economy has undergone three major phases: the 1978-1997 period marked as the SOE-led economy, the 1998-2015 phase as the investment-driven economy, and the new normal economy since 2016. All three economies have been shaped by the government's financial policies, defined as a set of...

We examine the effectiveness of forward guidance at the effective lower bound (ELB) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Survey evidence underscores the myopia of professional forecasters at the initial stages of the pandemic and the extraordinary dispersion of their recent forecasts....

In the financial crisis and recession induced by the Covid-19 pandemic, many investment-grade firms became unable to borrow from securities markets. In response, the Fed not only reopened its commercial paper funding facility but also announced it would purchase newly issued and seasoned bonds...

Monetary policy decisions tend to be based on systematic analysis of alternative policy choices and their associated macroeconomic impacts: this is science. Fiscal policy choices, in contrast, spring from unsystematic speculation, grounded more in politics than economics: this is alchemy. In...

Using the "trilemma indexes" developed by Aizenman et al. (2008) that measure the extent of achievement in each of the three policy goals in the trilemma--monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and financial openness--we examine how policy configurations affect macroeconomic...

We examine the quantitative impact of the Federal Reserve's mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchase program. We focus on how much of the recent decline in mortgage interest rate spreads can be attributed to these purchases. The question is more difficult than frequently perceived because of...