In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled the reserve requirements imposed on member banks. Ever since, the question of whether the doubling of reserve requirements increased reserve demand and produced a contraction of money and credit, and thereby helped to cause the recession of 1937-1938, has...

"When monetary policies are endogenous, the conventional VAR approach for detecting the effect of monetary policies is powerless. This paper proposes to test the implication of monetary policies along a different dimension. That implication is to exploit the policy induced exogeneity of...