As a result of legal restrictions on branch banking, an extensive interbank system developed in the United States during the 19th century to facilitate interregional payments and flows of liquidity and credit. Vast sums moved through the interbank system to meet seasonal and other demands, but...

We study the effects of stock market volatility on risk-taking and financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning up to 211 years and 60 countries. Prolonged periods of low volatility have strong in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power over the incidence of banking...

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...

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...

The U.S. payments industry is in the process of developing ubiquitous, safe, faster electronic solutions for making a broad variety of business and personal payments. How this market for faster payments will evolve will be shaped by a range of economic forces, such as economies of scale and...

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...