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...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility ("uncertainty"), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

Historical data and model simulations support the following conclusion. Inflation is low during stock market booms, so that an interest rate rule that is too narrowly focused on inflation destabilizes asset markets and the broader economy. Adjustments to the interest rate rule can remove this...

Asset prices and the equity premium might reflect doubts and pessimism. Introducing these features in an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model changes in a quite substantial way the nature of the policy that maximizes the welfare of the consumers in the model. First, following productivity...

Financial systems are inherently fragile because of the very function which makes them valuable: liquidity transformation. Regulatory reforms can strengthen the financial system and decrease the risk of liquidity crises, but they cannot eliminate it completely. This leaves monetary policy with a...

The paper presents a model of a monetary economy where there are differences in liquidity across assets. Money circulates because it is more liquid than other assets, not because it has any special function. There is a spectrum of returns on assets, reflecting their differences in liquidity. The...

We develop a model of monetary exchange in over-the-counter markets to study the effects of monetary policy on asset prices and standard measures of financial liquidity, such as bid-ask spreads, trade volume, and the incentives of dealers to supply immediacy, both by participating in the...

I extend the methods of G ̈urkaynak, Sack, and Swanson (2005) to separately identify the effects of Federal Reserve forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) during the 2009–15 U.S. zero lower bound (ZLB) period. I find that both forward guidance and LSAPs had substantial and...