New equity indices are calculated for the United States covering the period from 1791 to the present. Indices include the GFD US-100, the Curb/AMEX, indices for Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and other exchanges, new Railroad indices, Canada and Australia. The indices provide an opportunity to...

Surprisingly little is known about the importance of mortgage payment size for default, as efforts to measure the treatment effect of rate increases or loan modifi cations are confounded by borrower selection. We study a sample of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages that have experienced large rate...

This article makes an analytical comparison between simple, compound and continuous interest discount factors. It studies the equivalency relations between the three discount factors. An analysis is performed for a limited time period and of normal economy interest rates. It makes use of the...

How far to go – and to remain – in the direction of highly expansionary monetary policy hinges on the balance of marginal benefits and costs of additional monetary easing and its expected evolution over time. This paper sketches a framework for assessing this balance and applies it to four...

Surprisingly little is known about the importance of mortgage payment size for default, as efforts to measure the treatment effect of rate increases or loan modifications are confounded by borrower selection. We study a sample of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages that have experienced large rate...

Given their pegged exchange rate regimes, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries usually adjust their policy rates to match shifting U.S. monetary policy. This raises the important question of how changes in U.S. monetary policy affect banks in the GCC. We use bank-level panel data, exploiting...

We document wide dispersion in the mortgage rates that households pay on identical loans, and show that borrowers' financial sophistication is an important determinant of the rates obtained. We estimate a gap between the 10th and 90th percentile mortgage rate that borrowers with the same...

We present evidence of a risk-taking channel of monetary policy for the U.S. banking system. We use confidential data on banks' internal ratings on loans to businesses over the period 1997 to 2011 from the Federal Reserve's survey of terms of business lending. We find that ex-ante risk taking by...

Banks and bond investors have extended $9 trillion of US dollar credit to non-bank borrowers outside the United States. This has relevance for the discussion of global liquidity and global monetary policy transmission. This paper contributes to this policy discussion by analysing the links...

This paper is the first to quantify and analyze the dynamics of market risk (MR) and interest rate risk (IRR) of the system of US bank holding companies (BHCs) based on time-varying risk exposures estimated using the Kalman filter. These dynamics can be explained to a considerable degree by the...