Whether central banks should play an active role in bank supervision and regulation is being debated both in the United States and abroad. While the Bank of England has recently been stripped of its supervisory responsibilities and several proposals in the United States have advocated removing...

Would a more open and regular evaluation of the monetary policy framework improve policy in the United States? Even when considering a relatively short timeframe that spans the 1960s to the present, it is possible to point to many significant changes to the framework. Some of the changes were...

This Public Policy Brief presents analysis of the labor market by economic research staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. It is based on materials originally presented to the Board of Directors of the Boston Fed on April 8, 2004, with selective updates incorporating data reported in early...

Evidence of an operative credit channel has been inconclusive. The inability to clearly distinguish the effects of shocks to loan supply from those to loan demand has made it difficult to quantify the importance of this transmission mechanism to the economy. This paper provides an innovative...

Whether central banks should play an active role in bank supervision and regulation is being debated both in the United States and abroad. While the Bank of England has recently been stripped of its supervisory responsibilities and several proposals in the United States have advocated removing...

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act was enacted to monitor minority and low-income access to the mortgage market. The data collected for this purpose show that minorities are more than twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as whites. Yet variables correlated with both race and creditworthiness...

Even in a world with rational expectations, it has been well established theoretically that if the central bank possesses information superior to that available to the public, there is room for effective and socially beneficial countercyclical monetary policy. This paper tests whether...

This paper provides evidence that the Federal Reserve has an informational advantage over the public that can be exploited to improve activist monetary policy. The informational advantage derives from the Fed?s role as a bank supervisor, and it is shown to be of sufficient duration to be...

Evidence of an operative credit channel has been inconclusive. The inability to clearly distinguish the effects of shocks to loan supply from those to loan demand has made it difficult to quantify the importance of this transmission mechanism to the economy. This paper provides an innovative...

Several articles in the popular press have asserted that a simple comparison of average mortgage default rates for white and minority applicants is necessary and sufficient to uncover discrimination in mortgage lending. The fallacy of this assertion has been examined in Peterson (1981), Tootell...