This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...

The creation of the euro and the European Central Bank is a remarkable and unprecedented event in economic and political history: creating a supranational central bank and leaving eleven countries without national currencies of their own. The experience of the first year confirms that one size...

The influence of monetary policy over interest rates, and via interest rates over nonfinancial economic activity, stems from the central bank's role as a monopolist over the supply of bank reserves. Several trends already visible in the financial markets of many countries today threaten to...

In this paper I focus on two specific hazard areas in the transition from Stage Two to Stage Three of European economic and monetary union (EMU), as well as on some key problems of Stage Three that EMU's monetary and fiscal structures appear ill-prepared to handle. The transitional hazards are...

Central bank credibility plays a pivotal role in much of the modern literature on monetary policy, yet it is difficult to measure or even assess objectively. A survey of central bankers was conducted to determine their attitudes on two important issues: why credibility matters, and how...

We review the literature on the empirical characteristics of the global financial cycle and associated stylized facts on international capital flows, asset prices, risk aversion and liquidity in the financial system. We analyse the co-movements of global factors in asset prices and capital flows...

Before the 2008 crisis, the cross-sectional skewness of banks' leverage went up and macro risk concentrated in the balance sheets of large banks. Using a model of profit-maximizing banks with heterogeneous Value-at-Risk constraints, we extract the distribution of banks' risk-taking parameters...

There has been substantial research on the benefits of accumulating foreign reserves, but less on the relative merits of how these reserves are accumulated. In this paper we explore whether the form of accumulation affects country risk. We first present a model of endogenous sovereign debt...

Increasing the diversity of policy committees has taken center stage worldwide, but whether and why diverse committees are more effective is still unclear. In a randomized control trial that varies the salience of female and minority representation on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy...

Digitalization of Money is a crossroad in monetary history. Advances in technology has led to the development of new forms of money: virtual (crypto) currencies like bitcoin; stable coins like libra/diem; and central bank digital currencies (CBDC) like the Bahamian sand dollar. These innovations...