Confederate Treasury notes were convertible into government bonds at par. This provided an imbedded option value for the currency. Confederate interest-rate policy encouraged, and ultimately coerced, holders of Treasury notes to exchange these notes for bonds by imposing deadlines on their...

On August 11, 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 5.4% per year increase in the CPI for the third consecutive month, intensifying the ongoing debate about whether high inflation will prove temporary or more lasting. This paper seeks to inform this debate by evaluating the...

On 11 March 2015, SUERF jointly organised a conference with the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Austrian Society for Bank Research (Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft - BWG). The present SUERF Study 2015/2 includes a selection of papers based on the authors' contributions to the Vienna...

This paper uses a unique security-level data set to demonstrate that foreign institutional investors shift their U.S. corporate bond portfolios toward bonds with higher credit spreads when U.S. monetary policy tightens, which reflects institutional factors related to nominal return targets and...

One of the most critical and debated issues about the functioning of the classical gold standard is the issue of asymmetries in balance of payments adjustment. London is believed to be by several authors the 'conductor of the international orchestra' (Keynes, 1913, p. 19). This view implies a...

This article examines the monetary arrangements between Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom from the 1820s to the 1930s. It is argued that the three countries formed a monetary union for most of this period. A new analysis of inland and London exchange rates demonstrates that the union...

The paper analyses the global spillovers of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy measures since 2007. First, we find that Fed measures in the early phase of the crisis (QE1), but not since 2010 (QE2), were highly effective in lowering sovereign yields and raising equity markets...

In this paper I investigate the risk-taking channel of the monetary policy in the U.S. during the period of Large Scale Assets Purchases (LSAPs) programs; from November 2008 to September 2014. Using High-Frequency Identification (HFI) estimates of the monetary policy stance and constructed data...

Banks are compensated primarily through the net interest margin (NIM), which is the difference between the interest earned on their investments and the interest paid to their depositors and other creditors. In the low interest rate environment that has persisted since the Great Recession, banks...