The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on...

The small decline in the value of mortgage-related assets relative to the large total losses associated with the financial crisis suggests the presence of financial amplification mechanisms, which allow relatively small shocks to propagate through the financial system. We review the literature...

While many analyses of monetary policy consider only a target for a short-term nominal interest rate, other dimensions of policy have recently been of greater importance: changes in the supply of bank reserves, changes in the assets acquired by central banks, and changes in the interest rate...

Until 1935, Federal Reserve Banks from time to time purchased short-term securities directly from the United States Treasury to facilitate Treasury cash management operations. The authority to undertake such purchases provided a robust safety net that ensured Treasury could meet its obligations...

We have documented a regime change in the U.S. Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We first derived bounds on Treasury yields that account for dealer balance sheet costs, which we call the net short and net long curves. We show that actual Treasury yields moved from the net short...

This paper presents the novel results from an internationally coordinated project by the International Banking Research Network (IBRN) on the cross-border transmission of conventional and unconventional monetary policy through banks. Teams from seventeen countries use confidential micro-banking...

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

Several programs have been introduced by US fiscal and monetary authorities in response to the financial crisis. We examine the responses involving Treasury debt - the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), the Supplemental Financing Program, increases in Treasury issuance, and open market...

We study the implications of regional heterogeneity within a currency union for monetary policy. We ask, first, does monetary policy mitigate or exacerbate ex-post regional dispersion over the business cycle? And second, does ex-ante regional heterogeneity increase or dampen the aggregate...

The consensus suggests that subdued nominal U.S. Treasury yields on balance since the onset of the global financial crisis primarily reflect exceptionally low, if not occasionally negative, term premiums as opposed to low anticipated short rates. Depressed term premiums plausibly owe to...