Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced he would crack down on steroid use in baseball, hoping to stop players from doping. He was forced to discipline stars like Rafael Palmeiro, possibly hurting the game immediately, in order to develop a reputation for being tough on steroids....

By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation...

This paper provides evidence that interbank markets are tiered rather than flat, in the sense that most banks do not lend to each other directly but through money center banks acting as intermediaries. We capture the concept of tiering by developing a core-periphery model, and devise a procedure...

The dollar’s depreciation during the early floating rate period, 1973–1981, was a symptom of the Great Inflation. In that environment, sterilized foreign exchange interventions were ineffective in halting the dollar’s decline, but they showed a limited ability to smooth dollar movements....

Mortgage companies (MCs) originated about 60% of all mortgages before the 2007 crisis and continue to hold a 30% market share postcrisis. While financial regulations are strictly enforced for depository institutions (banks), they are weakly enforced for MCs even if they are subsidiaries of a...

This paper presents a dynamic model of a bank’s optimal choices of imposing a binding liquidity-coverage-ratio (LCR) constraint. Our baseline balance-sheet dynamics starts with portfolio separation and no LCR constraint. Under a scenario in which regulators prohibit banks from applying...

Mortgage companies (MCs) originated about 60% of all mortgages before the 2007 crisis and continue to hold a 30% market share postcrisis. While financial regulations are strictly enforced for depository institutions (banks), they are weakly enforced for MCs even if they are subsidiaries of a...

We modify the Diamond-Dybvig model studied in Green and Lin to incorporate a self-interested banker who has a private record-keeping technology. A public record-keeping device does not exist. We find that there is a trade-off between sophisticated contracts that possess relatively good...

It is well known that sunspot equilibria may arise under an interest-rate operating procedure in which the central bank varies the nominal rate with movements in future inflation (a forward-looking Taylor rule). This paper demonstrates that these sunspot equilibria may be learnable in the sense...

The Federal Reserve abandoned foreign-exchange-market intervention because it conflicted with the System’s commitment to price stability. By the early 1980s, economists generally concluded that, absent a portfolio-balance channel, sterilized foreign-exchange-market intervention did not provide...