Over the past fourteen years, the U.S. Federal Reserve has rescued overleveraged financial companies, purchased trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities, and created novel facilities to support ordinary businesses, nonprofits, and local governments. While some argue that the Fed has...

The ongoing financial crisis is shaking central bankers' certainties about their mission, and a rethinking of such mission can greatly benefit from a non-finalistic reassessment of how central banking has evolved over the centuries. This paper does so by taking a functional, instead of an...

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This...

Are central banks able to isolate their domestic economy by offsetting the effects of foreign capital flows? We provide an answer for the First Age of Globalization based on an exceptionally detailed and standardized database of monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e. 21)...

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This...

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This...

This essay examines in detail the properties of a well functioning monetary system - defined as money plus the mechanisms to execute payments - in both the short and long run, drawing on both theory and the lessons from history. It stresses the importance of trust and of the institutions needed...

Many investors today cling to the hope that the Federal Reserve will abandon its aggressive contractionary monetary policy once markets begin to capitulate. Given the fundamental conditions at play, however, investors would be wise to abandon such fantasy. Instead, this paper argues that the...

This paper summarizes the international evidence on the performance of quantitative easing (QE) as a monetary policy tool when conventional policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB). A large body of evidence suggests that expanding the central bank's balance sheet through...

Although there is a well-established theoretical literature that links central bank (CB) reputation with inflation performance following Barro and Gordon, there is little empirical work testing the relationship rigorously. This paper empirically tests the impact of reputation on...