This paper examines the impact of start-up regulations and institutional quality on the level of new business activity in a panel of 119 countries between 2001 and 2012. We find robust evidence that new business creation is significantly lower in countries with excessive barriers to entry, a...

Output effects of currency crises are often estimated to be negative and persistent. A new banking crisis database allows us to construct pure currency collapses that are not associated with banking crises. The estimates show that countries facing a pure currency crisis have fully recovery of...

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...

May 30, 2012. "Demographics, Redistribution, and Optimal Inflation," with Carlos Garriga and Christopher J. Waller. Presented by Christopher Waller at the 2012 BOJ-IMES Conference Demographic Changes and Macroeconomic Performance.