This paper surveys the role of the Federal Reserve within the financial regulatory system, with particular attention to the interaction of the Fed's role as both a supervisor and a lender-of-last-resort. The institutional design of the Federal Reserve System was aimed at preventing banking...

Credit booms usually precede financial crises. However, some credit booms end in a crisis (bad booms) and other booms do not (good booms). We document that, while all booms start with an increase in the growth of Total Factor Productivity (TFP), such growth falls much faster subsequently for bad...

Trade in securities markets is conducted by agents acting for principals, using "mark-to-market" contracts whereby performance is assessed using security market prices. We endogenize contract choices, information production, informed trading, and security price informativeness. But there is a...

“When confidence is lost, liquidity dries up.” The authors investigate the meaning of “confidence” and “liquidity” in the context of the recent financial crisis, which they maintain is a manifestation of an age-old problem with private money creation: banking panics. The authors...

We construct an equally-weighted index of commodity futures monthly returns over the period between July of 1959 and December of 2004 in order to study simple properties of commodity futures as an asset class. Fully-collateralized commodity futures have historically offered the same return and...

We study the basic properties of an equally-weighted index of U.S. commodity futures from the perspective of a Japanese investor. We find that the returns on the U.S. equally-weighted commodity futures index maintain their basic properties, documented in Gorton and Rouwenhorst (2005), when...

This note is a response to a recent paper by Erb and Harvey (2005). We show that diversification returns are mathematical properties of geometric averages of index returns, and not due to rebalancing. We also show how rebalancing affects the performance of the equal-weighted commodity futures...