There are concerns that the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) has impeded small business lending. By increasing the fixed regulatory compliance requirements needed to make business loans and operate a bank, the DFA disproportionately reduced the incentives for all banks to make very modest loans and reduced...

In the financial crisis and recession induced by the Covid-19 pandemic, many investment-grade firms became unable to borrow from securities markets. In response, the Fed not only reopened its commercial paper funding facility but also announced it would purchase newly issued and seasoned bonds...

This study offers a single, consistent model that tracks the velocity of broad money (M2) since 1929, including the Great Depression, the global financial crisis, and the Great Recession. The model emphasizes the roles of changes in uncertainty and risk premia, financial innovation, and major...

Economic policy uncertainty affects decisions of households, businesses, policy makers and Financial intermediaries. We first examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty on aggregate bank credit growth. Then we analyze commercial bank entity level data to gauge the effects of policy...

The rise of inflation in 2021 and 2022 surprised many macroeconomists who ignored the earlier surge in money growth because past instability in the demand for simple-sum monetary aggregates had made these aggregates unreliable indicators. We find that the demand for more theoretically-based...

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The...

This paper examines the economic environments in which past U.S. stock market booms occurred as a first step toward understanding how asset price booms come about and whether monetary policy should be used to defuse booms. We identify several episodes of sustained rapid rise in equity prices in...

This paper examines the origins and early performance of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort. The Fed was established to overcome the problems of the National Banking era, in particular an "inelastic" currency and the absence of an effective lender of last resort. As conceived by Paul...

The dollar's depreciation during the early floating rate period, 1973 - 1981, was a symptom of the Great Inflation. In that environment, sterilized foreign exchange interventions were ineffective in halting the dollar's decline, but showed a limited ability to smooth dollar movements. Only after...

In this paper we revisit the debate over the role of the banking panics in 1930-33 in precipitating the Great Contraction. The issue hinges over whether the panics were illiquidity shocks and hence in support of Friedman and Schwartz (1963) greatly exacerbated the recession which had begun in...