Considerable debate rages about whether Federal Reserve policy was too lax in the early part of the 2000s, thereby fueling the home-price bubble that was the proximate cause of the global financial crisis. We present evidence that the view that modest alterations to monetary policy have vast...

While the degree of policy inertia in central banks' reaction functions is a central ingredient in theoretical and empirical monetary economics, the source of the observed policy inertia in the U.S. is controversial, with tests of competing hypotheses such as interest-smoothing and...

The Recession of 1937-38 is often cited as illustrating the dangers of withdrawing fiscal and monetary stimulus too early in a weak recovery. Yet our understanding of this severe downturn is incomplete: existing studies find that changes in fiscal policy were small in comparison to the magnitude...

We evaluate the effect of the Federal Reserve's purchase of long-term Treasuries and other long-term bonds ("QE1" in 2008-2009 and "QE2" in 2010-2011) on interest rates. Using an event-study methodology we reach two main conclusions. First, it is inappropriate to focus only on Treasury rates as...

The federal funds rate has been stuck at the zero bound for over two years and the Fed has turned to unconventional monetary policies, such as large scale asset purchases to provide stimulus to the economy. This paper uses a structural VAR with daily data to identify the effects of monetary...

In this paper, we use cross-industry, cross-country panel data to test whether industry growth is positively affected by the interaction between the reactivity of real short term interest rates to the business cycle and industry-level measures of financial constraints. Financial constraints are...

We revisit the transmission mechanism of monetary policy for household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of household wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two key features: multiple assets with...

We study how changes in the value of the steady-state real interest rate affect the optimal inflation target, both in the U.S. and the euro area, using an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model that incorporates the zero (or effective) lower bound on the nominal interest rate. We find that this...

The paper considers three methods for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and thus for restoring symmetry to domain over which the central bank can vary its policy rate. They are: (1) abolishing currency (which would also be a useful crime-fighting measure); (2) paying...

The use of forward interest rates as a monetary policy indicator is demonstrated, using Sweden 1992-1994 as an example. The forward rates are interpreted as indicating market expectations of the time- path of future interest rates, future inflation rates, and future currency depreciation rates....