This paper uses the historical narrative record to determine whether inflation expectations shifted during the second quarter of 1933, precisely as the recovery from the Great Depression took hold. First, by examining the historical news record and the forecasts of contemporary business...

What are the origins and consequences of the state as a provider of public goods? We study legal reforms that established mass public education and increased state capacity in German cities during the 1500s. These fundamental changes in public goods provision occurred where ideological...

This paper provides the necessary technical background to understand basic Bitcoin operations and documents a set of empirical regularities related to Bitcoin usage. We present the micro-structure of the Bitcoin transaction process and highlight the use of cryptography for the purposes of...

The emerging world of decentralized finance (DeFi), facilitated by smart contracts operating on blockchain networks, has been notable both for its rapid growth and the high-profile collapses of several of its largest participants. In this paper, we provide a technical account of the financial...

The value of assets in the digital ecosystem has grown rapidly, amid periods of high volatility. Does the digital financial system create new potential challenges to financial stability? This paper explores this question using the Federal Reserve’s framework for analyzing vulnerabilities in...

This paper updates the standard workhorse model of banks' reserve management to include frictions inherent to money markets. We apply the model to study monetary policy implementation through an operating regime involving voluntary reserve targets (VRT). When reserves are abundant, as is the...

We explore the historical composition of the Federal Reserve's Treasury portfolio and its effect on Treasury yields. Using data from 1985 to 2016, we show that the divergence of the composition of the Federal Reserve's portfolio from overall Treasury securities outstanding is associated with a...

One of the fundamental questions concerning inside money is whether its issuers should be regulated and how. This paper evaluates the efficiency of one prevalent regulatory recommendation - a requirement that private issuers redeem inside money on demand at par - in a random-matching model of...

Methods of monetary policy implementation continue to change. The level of reserve supply -- scarce, abundant, or somewhere in between -- has implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of an implementation regime. The money market events of September 2019 highlight the need for an...

Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve as well as new Basel III banking regulations have led to important changes in U.S. money markets. Most notably the interbank market has essentially disappeared with the dramatic increase in excess reserves held by banks. We build a model in the...