Ben S. Bernanke, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, discovered his fondness for numbers during his boyhood in Georgia and South Carolina.

A history of the evolution of political economy models in the early 1930s--crucial years of change in the supervision and regulation of the financial industry--outlining the policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, the change of focus in the Federal Reserve Board from...

This paper compares the role of stochastic volatility versus changes in monetary policy rules in accounting for the time-varying volatility of U.S. aggregate data. Of special interest to the authors is understanding the sources of the great moderation of business cycle fluctuations that the U.S....