Recent research has found that monetary policy works in part by influencing the risk premiums on both traded financial-market securities and intermediated loans. Research has also shown that when risk premiums are compressed, there is an increased likelihood of a reversal that damages the...

The European Central Bank is unique in setting monetary policy for several sovereign states with heterogeneous debt levels and different maturity structures. The monetary-fiscal nexus is central to the functioning of the euro area. We focus on one particular aspect of that nexus, the effect the...

We consider a New Keynesian model with strategic monetary and fiscal interactions. The fiscal authority maximizes social welfare. Monetary policy is delegated to a central bank with an anti-inflation bias that suffers from a lack of commitment. The impact of central bank hawkishness on debt...

The world economy has experienced the largest financial crisis in generations, a global pandemic, and a resurgence in inflation during the first quarter of the 21st century, yielding important insights for central banking. Price stability has important benefits and is the responsibility of a...

In response to the Global Financial Crisis, central banks engaged in large-scale asset purchases funded by the issuance of reserves. These "unconventional" policies continued during the pandemic, so that by 2022 central banks' balance sheets had grown up to ten-fold. As a result of rapidly...

This paper uses evidence from the Federal Open Market Committee's Summary of Economic Projections to show that US monetary policymakers have objectives over unemployment and inflation outcomes that are not well-approximated through a conventional quadratic loss function. Rather, policymakers...

We conduct a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of large-scale securities purchases, using the Federal Reserve's QE4 program as a concrete example. This program was initiated at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 and continued for two years, leading to a doubling of the Fed's...

I separately identify and estimate the effects of the Federal Reserve's federal funds rate, forward guidance, and large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) policies on the U.S. economy. I extend the high-frequency identification strategy of Bauer and Swanson (2023b) for monetary policy VARs by allowing...

Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

Uncertainty is a ubiquitous concern emphasized by policymakers. We study how uncertainty affects decision-making by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). We distinguish between the notion of Fed-managed uncertainty vis-a-vis uncertainty that emanates from within the economy and which the Fed...