The economics literature is full of studies of monetary or currency unions ranging from the sterling area before 1914, to the Bretton Woods system later and the euro zone within the European Monetary Union today. A quick search in Econ-Lit returned over 10,000 entries among abstracts and...

Improvements in information processing technology andderegulation, among other forces, are profoundlytransforming the financial sector of the United States and otheradvanced economies. Many of these changes are likely toimprove the efficiency of financial intermediation, in the sensethat the...

Several authors have documented a reduced variability ofoutput and inflation in the United States since the beginningof the 1980s.1 In fact, a comparison of the 1980:1-2001:2 periodwith the two preceding decades shows that the standarddeviation of quarterly output growth has fallen 30...

Asset market values react to economic news and policychanges, and consumers react to changes in asset marketvalues. The consumption-wealth channel of monetary policyspells out this mechanism: changes in monetary policy affectasset values, which in turn affect consumer spending onnondurable goods...

[...]In the first half of the paper, we review the significantchanges in the housing finance system over the past thirty yearsand discuss the implications of these changes for the cost andavailability of mortgage credit. In the second half, we present atwo-part econometric analysis of the...

[...]This paper looks for evidence of both types of crediteffects—those that are endogenous to the monetarymechanism and those that are exogenous—using informationon banks’ commercial credit standards as a proxy for bankcredit availability. We compare results from an...

[...]This paper investigates whether the cyclical effects ofmonetary policy have been influenced by the secular growth insecuritization in recent decades. In particular, when the centralbank makes a specific monetary policy move—such asincreasing the overnight interbank rate by 50 basis...