This paper investigates empirically the effects of personal and corporate taxes on taxable interest rates and on the spread between taxable and tax-exempt rates. Two main sets of results emerge. First, we establish that the effective marginal investors in the Treasury bill market are households,...

This study investigates whether the apparent intertemporal instability of a particular reduced-form equation (that for interest rates) can be explained by changing government policy parameters, or regimes, and otherwise stable structural parameters. We hypothesize that major fiscal, monetary,...

This article demonstrates why the procedures used in previous studies do not permit inference about the relationship between interestrates and taxes. We present a model that leads to direct estimates of the degree to which interest rates respond to changes in tax rates. The empirical results...

This paper rejects the proposition that there is only a single interesting question to ask about the decade of the 1930s. It is concerned not only with the role of money in the 1929-33 contraction but also with the relative role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in the recession of 1937-38 and...

Small businesses rely on banks for credit more than large businesses do. As a result, small business may be more adversely affected when adverse shocks, such as reduced bank capital or higher interest rates, reduce the supply of bank loans. We use annual, state-level data for 1990-2000 to...

From their beginnings in 1908, credit unions have differed from banks. One fundamental difference was that share accounts in credit unions, unlike bank deposits, were not debt. Credit unions could delay and discount payments. Thus, during the Great Depression, when thousands of banks failed, no...

Many countries around the world have experienced banking crises in the past two decades, and all countries are witnessing substantial changes in the structure and nature of banking. These developments have led national and multilateral policymakers to focus increased attention on the crucial...

We investigated whether in recent years banks have increased their holdings of securities at the expense of their holdings of business loans in response to short-falls of their capital relative to risk-weighted capital standards and relative to a capital standard that made no explicit allowance...

The Federal Reserve System imposes caps and charges fees on the negative intraday balances in banks' reserve accounts, i.e., on daylight overdrafts. Our empirical results suggest that caps alone did little to reduce daylight overdrafts in the aggregate. By contrast, the 1994 imposition of fees...