This paper examines the role of financial instability in setting monetary policy. The paper begins with a model that examines the interaction of monetary and regulatory policy. It then empirically tests whether financial instability has affected monetary policy. One important innovation is to...

As is widely recognized, real interest rates in the early 1980s were at peaks not witnessed since the late 1920s. Less well perceived is the sharp decline in real interest rates in the middle 1980s to their average levels of the previous quarter century. This paper seeks to identify the...

The inability to clearly distinguish the effects of shocks to loan supply from those to loan demand has made it difficult to quantify the economic importance of the credit channel in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. This study provides an innovative approach to identifying loan...

The dramatic reduction in the growth rate of bank lending associated with the 1990-91 recession, particularly in New England, has evoked claims by many observers of a credit crunch. To overcome the difficulty in determining whether the observed slow credit growth is a demand or supply...

This study investigates whether the recent poor performance and inst ability of reduced-form interest-rate equations can be accounted for by changes in monetary policy regimes. The results imply that reduced -form coefficients move by statistically-significant and economically -meaningful...

Focusing on localized measures of bank health and economic activity, and renters as well as homeowners, this paper uses an innovative approach to identifying households likely in need of credit to investigate the effect on household spending of a deterioration in local-bank health. The analysis...

We investigate the misallocation of credit in Japan associated with banks' evergreening loans, distinguishing between two types of firm distress: (perhaps temporary) financial distress and technical distress, which reflects weak operational capabilities, as indicated by low total factor...