This paper reviews the unconventional U.S. monetary policy responses to the financial and real crises of 2007-09, divided into three groups: interest rate policy, quantitative policy, and credit policy. To interpret interest rate policy, it compares the Federal Reserve's actions with the...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...

This paper identifies optimal interest-rate rules within a rich, dynamic, general equilibrium model that has been shown to account well for observed aggregate dynamics in the postwar United States. We perform policy evaluations based on second-order accurate approximations to conditional and...

This paper provides the first comprehensive econometric analysis of the causes of bank distress during the Depression. We assemble bank-level data for virtually all Fed member banks, and combine those data with county-level, state-level, and national-level economic characteristics to capture...