This article reexamines the conventional wisdom that commercial banking is in severe decline. A careful reading of the evidence does not support it. True, on-balance sheet assets held by commercial banks have declined as a share of total intermediary assets. But this measure ignores the...

Over the past twenty years the world's major central banks have been largely successful at bringing inflation under control. While it is premature to suggest that inflation is no longer an issue of great concern, it is quite conceivable that the next battles facing central bankers will lie on a...

Gal and Gertler (1999) developed a hybrid variation of the New Keynesian Phillips curve that relates inflation to real marginal cost, expected future inflation and lagged inflation. GMM estimates of the model suggest that forward looking behavior is highly important; the coefficient on expected...

We develop and estimate a structural model of inflation that allows for a fraction of firms that use a backward looking rule to set prices. The model nests the purely forward looking New Keynesian Phillips curve as a particular case. We use measures of marginal costs as the relevant determinant...

This article argues that the poor performance of the U.S. banking industry in the 1980s was due mainly to the risk-taking of the largest banks, which was encouraged by the U.S. government's too-big-to-fail policy. The article documents the recent trend toward riskier bank portfolios and the...