In August 2011, the Swiss National Bank engaged in unconventional monetary policy through an unprecedented expansion of bank reserves. As these actions did not involve any outright long-term asset purchases, this unique episode allows for novel insights on the transmission mechanism of central...

Using a large sample of private international bond issues, we document a substantial decline in the share of international bonds denominated in major reserve currencies over the last two decades, and an increase in bonds denominated in issuers’ home currencies. These secular trends appear to...

The international transmission of shocks in the global financial system has always been an important issue for policy makers. Different types of foreign shocks have different effects and policy implications. In this paper, we examine the effects of the recent U.S. financial crisis and the...

The renewal of interest in macroeconomic theories of search frictions in the goods market requires a deeper understanding of the cyclical properties of the intensive margins in this market. We review the theoretical mechanisms that promote either procyclical or countercyclical movements in time...

The modern view of monetary policy stresses its role in shaping the entire yield curve of interest rates in order to achieve various macroeconomic objectives. A crucial element of this process involves guiding financial market expectations of future central bank actions. Recently, a few central...

We study the convergence of European bond markets and the anchoring of inflation expectations in euro area countries using high-frequency bond yield data for France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We find that Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has led to substantial convergence in euro area sovereign...

Data on international relative prices from industrialized countries show large and systematic deviations from relative purchasing power parity. We embed a model of imperfect competition and variable markups in some of the recently developed quantitative models of international trade to examine...

Modern corporate finance theory argues that although bank monitoring is beneficial to borrowers, it also allows banks to use the private information they gain through monitoring to "hold-up" borrowers for higher interest rates. In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for this information...

Under federal-state law workers who quit a job are not entitled to receive unemployment insurance benefits. To show how the existence of the uninsured affects wages and employment, I extend an equilibrium search model to account for two types of unemployed workers: those who are currently...

We show that professional forecasters have essentially no ability to predict future recessions a few quarters ahead. This is particularly puzzling because, for at least the past two decades, researchers have provided much evidence that the yield curve, specifically the spread between long- and...