This paper studies the interaction of government debt and financial markets. Both markets are fragile: excessively responsive to fundamentals and prone to strategic uncertainty. This interaction, termed a 'diabolic loop', is driven by government choice to bail out banks and the resulting...

Changes in both the macroeconomy and in macroeconomics suggest that the IS-LM-AS model is no longer the best baseline model of short-run fluctuations for teaching and policy analysis. This paper presents an alternative model that replaces the assumption that the central bank targets the money...

Interbank money markets have been subject to substantial impairments in the recent decade, such as a decline in unsecured lending and substantial increases in haircuts on posted collateral. This paper seeks to understand the implications of these developments for the broader economy and monetary...

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...

This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on the federal funds market, specifically the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Rather than a complete collapse of lending in the presence of a market wide shock, we see that banks become more restrictive in which counterparties they...

At the center of the financial market crisis of 2007-2008 was a highly unusual jump in spreads between the overnight inter-bank lending rate and term London inter-bank offer rates (Libor). Because many private loans are linked to Libor rates, the sharp increase in these spreads raised the cost...

This paper develops a generalization of the formulas proposed by Kuttner (2001) and others for purposes of measuring the effects of a change in the fed funds target on Treasury yields of different maturities. The generalization avoids the need to condition on the date of the target change and...

Many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets' expectations of future monetary policy. However, to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia, these measures require some adjustment to account for these premia. In this paper, we document...

Conventional measures of monetary policy, such as the federal funds rate, are surely influenced by forces other than monetary policy. More importantly, central banks adjust policy in response to a wide range of information about future economic developments. As a result, estimates of the effects...

We measure monetary policy shocks as changes in the Fed funds target rate that surprise bond markets in daily data. These shock series avoid the omitted variable, time-varying parameter, and orthogonalization problem of monthly VARs, and do not impose the expectations hypothesis. We find...