This paper examines the origins and early performance of the Federal Reserve as lender of last resort. The Fed was established to overcome the problems of the National Banking era, in particular an “inelastic” currency and the absence of an effective lender of last resort. As conceived by...

An increasing number of central banks implement monetary policy via two standing facilities: a lending facility and a deposit facility. In this paper we show that it is socially optimal to implement a non-zero interest rate spread. We prove this result in a dynamic general equilibrium model...

This paper uses several methods to study the interrelationship among Divisia monetary aggregates, prices, and income, allowing for nonstationary, nonlinearities, asymmetries, and time-varying relationships among the series. We propose a multivariate regime switching unobserved components model...

Making the central bank more independent from political pressures lowers inflation and increases the primary deficit, persistently. In the long-run, however, fiscal considerations are paramount and inflation comes back up to accommodate the higher financial burden of accumulated public debt....

We review the responses of the Federal Reserve to financial crises over the past 100 years. The authors of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 created an institution that they hoped would prevent banking panics from occurring. When this original framework did not prevent the banking panics of the...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of forward guidance for the central banks of four countries: New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. We test whether forward guidance improved market participants’ ability to forecast future short-term and long-term rates. We find that...

The number of commercial banks in the United States has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1984. This consolidation of the U.S. banking industry and the accompanying large increase in average (and median) bank size have prompted concerns about the effects of consolidation and increasing bank...

Svensson (2003) argues strongly that specific targeting rules*first order optimality conditions for a specific objective function and model*are normatively superior to instrument rules for the conduct of monetary policy. That argument is based largely upon four main objections to the latter plus...

Most intervention studies have been silent on the assumed structure of the economic system—implicitly imposing implausible assumptions—despite the fact that inference depends crucially on such issues. This paper identifies the cross-effects of intervention and the level of exchange rates...

This paper extends the genetic programming techniques developed in Neely, Weller and Dittmar (1997) to show that technical trading rules can make use of information about U.S. foreign exchange intervention to improve their out-of-sample profitability for two of four exchange rates. Rules tend to...