This paper argues that the U.S. economy's recovery from the Great Depression was driven by a shift in expectations brought about by the policy actions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the monetary policy side, Roosevelt abolished the gold standard and-even more important-announced the...

We study competitive, but strategic, brokers executing trades for an informed trader in a multi-period setting. The brokers can choose to (a) execute the order, as agents, first, and trade for themselves, as dealers, afterwards; or (b) trade for themselves first and execute the order later. We...

We construct a price index with weights for the prices of different PCE (personal consumption expenditures) goods chosen to minimize the welfare costs of nominal distortions. In this cost-of-nominal-distortions index (CONDI), the weights are computed in a multi-sector New Keynesian model with...

This paper explores the effects of central bank transparency on the performance of optimal inflation targeting rules. I assume that both the central bank and the private sector face uncertainty about the "correct" model of the economy and have to learn. A transparent central bank can reduce one...

Emerging market economies often face sudden stops in capital inflows or reduced access to the international capital market. This paper analyzes what monetary policy should accomplish in such an event. Optimal monetary policy induces higher interest rates and exchange rate depreciation. The...

Policy analysis with potentially misspecified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models faces two challenges: estimation of parameters that are relevant for policy trade-offs and treatment of estimated deviations from the cross-equation restrictions. This paper develops and explores...

Although large changes in real exchange rates have occurred during the past decades, the real implications of these movements remain an empirical question. Using detailed data from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan, we examine the implications of exchange rates for time...

There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework...

Empirical research over the last decade has uncovered predictive relationships between the slope of the yield curve and subsequent real activity and inflation. Some of these relationships are highly significant, but their theoretical motivations suggest that they may not be stable over time. We...

Previous comparative analyses of gross and net settlement have focused on the credit risk of the central counterparty in net settlement arrangements, and on the incentives for participants to alter the risk of the portfolio under net settlement. By modeling the trading economy that generates the...