Collateral-based monetary policy tools have been used extensively by major central banks. Lack of proper policy counterfactuals, however, makes it difficult to empirically identify their causal effects on the financial market and the real economy. We exploit a quasi-natural ex-periment in...

This paper reviews what cryptocurrencies are, and it frames them within the context of historical monetary experiences and contemporary monetary economics. The paper argues that, as pure duciary private money, cryptocurrencies are a bubble without a fundamental value and that they will not...

We study optimal macroprudential policy in a model in which unconventional shocks, in the form of news about future fundamentals and regime changes in world interest rates,interact with collateral constraints in driving the dynamics of financial crises. These shocks strengthen incentives to...

Quantitative analysis of a New Keynesian model with the Bernanke-Gertler accelerator and risk shocks shows that violations of Tinbergen's Rule and strategic interaction between policy-making authorities undermine significantly the effectiveness of monetary and financial policies. Separate...

Collateral constraints widely used in models of financial crises feature a pecuniary externality: Agents do not internalize how borrowing decisions taken in "good times" affect collateral prices during a crisis. We show that agents in a competitive equilibrium borrow more than a financial...

To end a financial crisis, the central bank is to lend freely, against good collateral, at a high rate, according to Bagehot's Rule. We argue that in theory and in practice there is a missing ingredient to Bagehot's Rule: secrecy. Re-creating confidence requires that the central bank lend in...

We propose and solve a small-scale New-Keynesian model with Markov sunspot shocks that move the economy between a targeted-inflation regime and a deflation regime and fit it to data from the U.S. and Japan. For the U.S. we find that adverse demand shocks have moved the economy to the zero lower...

In this paper we report the results of the estimation of a rich dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the U.S. economy with both stochastic volatility and parameter drifting in the Taylor rule. We use the results of this estimation to examine the recent monetary history of the...

The monetary arrangements of societies are the result of the interplay of technology and ideas. Technology determines, for example, which coins can be minted and at what cost. For centuries, minting small-denomination coinage was too costly to induce Western European governments to supply enough...

We develop a DSGE model in which the policy rate signals to price setters the central bank's view about macroeconomic developments. The model is estimated with likelihood methods on a U.S. data set that includes the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price setters' inflation...