Financial innovation is inextricably tied to asymmetric information and therefore sets the stage for financial crises. Over history, every truly meaningful crisis has had elements of asymmetric information, particularly affecting innovative financial instruments that are primary market...

This paper analyzes how government intervention in the market for banks' troubled assets is best designed, and also uses this analysis to evaluate the public-private investment program announced by the U.S. government in March 2009. I begin by presenting the case for using government funds to...

Supervisors sometimes have to manage both the micro- and macro-prudential dimensions of bank stability. These may either conflict or complement each other. We analyze prudential supervision by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). We find evidence of micro-prudential concerns, measured as the...

Supervisors sometimes have to manage both the micro- and macro-prudential dimensions of bank stability. These may either conflict or complement each other. We analyze prudential supervision by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). We find evidence of micro-prudential concerns, measured as the...

We focus on the conflict between two central bank objectives - individual bank stability and systemic stability - and the regulatory forbearance that follows from it. We study the licensing policy of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) during 1999-2002. Banks in highly concentrated bank markets,...

In 2003 China posted its highest economic growth rate in seven years, a robust 9.1 percent. Today the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) dwarfs by more than eight fold its level of 1978, the year China began taking its first tentative steps away from a centrally-planned communist economy...

Following the Treasury–Federal Reserve Accord of March 3, 1951, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) focused on free reserves—the difference between excess reserves (reserve deposits in excess of reserve requirements) and borrowed reserves—as the touchstone of U.S. monetary policy....

The Eurozone today is going into the same deflationary situation that the U.S. did under Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank, and the post-Civil War budget surpluses that deflated the economy. But whereas the Fed's creation was designed to inflate the U.S. economy, Europe's European Central...

This article questions the model of central bank independence by considering the mainstream empirical literature that purports to correlate central bank independence with lower inflation rates. The studies, conducted mostly prior to the 2008 financial crisis, mimic the flaws in the risk...