Research has generally failed to find reliable connections between official exchange-market interventions and exchange rates that are consistent with either a monetary or a portfolio-balance theory of exchange-rate determination. Recently economists have suggested that intervention might...

I perform an empirical analysis of Euler equations for the firm's choices of capital, labor, hours, and debt. Financial structure has real effects , since taxes favor debt. However, the cost of debt increases with the debt-to-collateral ratio, and capital is part of collateral. The data, for...

An investigation of the impact of U.S. and German central-bank interventions on the forward discount puzzle for two exchange rates-the German mark/U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen/U.S. dollar-using official 1985-91 data. The evidence on the importance of intervention is strongest for the DM/$....

A comparison of official data on U.S. foreign exchange intervention with newspaper reports, finding that the series are systematically different and implying either that intervention may not be able to signal monetary policy accurately or that not all market participants have equally accurate...

In light of research questioning the usefulness of economists' models of exchange-rate determination, this paper investigates the rationality of survey measures of expectations for Deutschmark/dollar exchange rates for 1989-97. Using Liu and Maddala's (1992) "restricted cointegration" test, the...

An examination of the ability of foreign exchange intervention to signal upcoming changes in monetary policy, showing that for such a signaling mechanism to make sense, the link between intervention and monetary policy should be clear, the implied policy should be credible, and information about...

Foreign-exchange-market intervention is generally ineffective when undertaken independent of monetary policy. But when undertaken as a goal of monetary policy, exchange-rate management can compromise price stability. This Economic Commentary explains the difficulties of implementing an...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of commercial bank holdings of municipal securities (munis) from June 1985 through December 1988, using the FFIEC's Reports of Condition and income. While motivated by previous analyses suggesting that a shift from munis to taxable securities is a...

An analysis of the differential impacts of reported and actual U.S. foreign exchange intervention on the mean and conditional variance of the Deutschemark-to-dollar and yen-to-dollar exchange rates. For part of the sample period, the impact of intervention on the variance of the exchange rates...

An analysis of a q model of investment in which financial structure affects firm value, using a perfect foresight model of general equilibrium that includes a debt-related agency cost; uses the comparative statics and dynamics of changing the corporate tax rate as an illustration.