We examine a concerted debt reduction deal between a sovereign debtor, a private creditor, and an official creditor, who insures the deposits of the commercial bank. Our results show that a weakening of the financial position of the commercial bank reduces the contribution of the commercial bank...

The case for an independent central bank is becoming increasingly accepted. This new orthodoxy is based on three foundations: the success of the Bundesbank and the German economy over the past forty years; the theoretical academic literature on the inflationary bias of discretionary...

This paper uses Whiteman's(1986) frequency-domain optimization methodology to parameterize the precommitment period in a standard rational expectations policy design model. This allows researchers to adopt an empirical approach to the time consistency issue. That is, the operative commitment...

The information value of central bank announcements of projected future money growth is shown to depend both on the accuracy of the announcements and the extent to which the announcements themselves are anticipated by the public. We construct a new data set on internal Federal Reserve money...

This paper examines the speed with which abnormal economic profits (that is, profits greater than or less than required to compensate for the real opportunity cost of capital including risk) vanish in the U.S. banking industry. Positive economic profits arise from random "good luck," or from...

Remarks at the Georgia Bankers Association's Annual Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, June 15, 2009

This paper studies the implications of securities activities on bank safety and soundness by comparing the ex-post returns between banking firms' Section 20 subsidiaries -- subsidiaries that were authorized by the Federal Reserve to conduct bank-ineligible securities activities -- and their...