The Federal Reserve's 2009 program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury securities represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and provides a natural experiment with the potential to shed light on the price elasticities of Treasuries and theories of supply effects in...

The Federal Reserve's 2009 program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury securities represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and provides a natural experiment with the potential to shed light on the price elasticities of Treasuries and theories of supply effects in...

In this study I examine the welfare implications of monetary policy by constructing a novel New Keynesian model that properly accounts for asset pricing facts. I find that the Ramsey optimal monetary policy yields an inflation rate above 3.5% and inflation volatility close to 1.5%. The same...

Well known research based on capitalized income tax data shows robust growth in wealth concentration in the late 2000s. We show that these robust growth estimates rely on an assumption---homogeneous rates of return across the wealth distribution---that is not supported by data. When the...

Public debt can be optimal in standard incomplete market models with infinitely lived agents, since the associated capital crowd-out induces a higher interest rate. The higher interest rate encourages individuals to save and, hence, better self-insure against idiosyncratic labor earnings risk....

We evaluate the economic costs and benefits for bank capital levels in the United States. The framework and analysis is similar to that found in previous studies though we tailor the analysis to the specific features and experience of the U.S. financial system and account for the impact of new...

We explore the role of evolving beliefs regarding the structure of the macroeconomy in improving our understanding of the term structure of interest rates within the context of a simple macro-finance model. Using quarterly vintages of real-time data and survey forecasts for the United States...

This paper explores the relationship between the health of the financial sector and the rest of the economy. We develop an indicator of financial sector health using a distance-to-default measure based on a Merton-style option pricing model. Our measure spans over three decades and appears to...

Which of the strategies for financing constraints in economic models is the most empirically plausible? This paper tests two commonly used models of financing constraints, costly state verification (Townsend, 1979) and moral hazard (Holmström and Tirole, 1997), using a comprehensive data set of...

We employ empirical pricing models for mortgage-backed security (MBS) yields and for mortgage rates to measure deviations from normal market functioning in order to assess how the Federal Reserve MBS purchase program -- a 16 month program announced on November 25, 2008 and completed on March 31,...