This paper constructs the first repeat sales house price index in United States history before 1950, using data from Baltimore. It shows that house prices fell more during the 1890s and 1930s than existing data indicate. As a result, while previous data suggest most borrowers should have been...

This paper contributes to the literature on moral hazard, lending of last resort and the political origins of banking crises. Drawing on newly accessed quantitative and qualitative archival sources the paper documents how a bank-Banco de Cataluña-formed a coalition with the Dictatorship of...

This paper studies optimal bank capital requirements in a model of endogenous bank funding conditions. I find that requirements should be higher during good times such that a macroprudential "buffer" is provided. However, whether banks can use buffers to maintain lending during a financial...

The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed's failure as a lender of last...

We consider a Keynes-Goodwin model of effective demand and the distributive cycle where workers purchase goods and houses with marginal propensity significantly larger than one. They therefore need credit, supplied from asset holders, and have to pay interest on their outstanding debt. In this...

The economics literature lacks articles that provide a broad roadmap-let alone a logical explanation-of the new set of Federal Reserve policy tools that were created to counter the COVID-19 recession. This study provides an overview of the motivation for these new credit-easing programs-namely...

Countercyclical bank capital requirements have emerged as a popular regulatory tool to help smooth financial cycles. The idea is to reduce capital requirements when exogenous shocks cause aggregate bank capital to decrease so that regulation does not needlessly constrain banks' supply of credit....