This paper introduces an approach to the study of optimal government policy in economies characterized by a coordination problem and multiple equilibria. Such models are often criticized as not being useful for policy analysis because they fail to assign a unique prediction to each possible...

The Federal Reserve implements its monetary policy objectives by intervening in the interbank market for overnight loans. In particular, it aims to change the supply of reserves available to commercial banks so that the (average) interest rate in this market equals an announced target rate. A...

Self-fulfilling expectations are commonly believed to play an important role in the transmission of currency crises across countries. Formal models of contagion based on multiple equilibria, however, have been criticized for failing to explain basic patterns observed in the data; these criticisms...

The quantity of reserves in the U.S. banking system has risen dramatically since September 2008. Some commentators have expressed concern that this pattern indicates that the Federal Reserve's liquidity facilities have been ineffective in promoting the flow of credit to firms and households....

These notes provide an introduction to the study of optimal growth in the one-sector neoclassical growth model in continuous time. The model is developed using the analogy of Robinson Crusoe living on a deserted island. Both the Hamiltonian method and the phase diagram are presented and...

We study the Green and Lin (2003) model of financial intermediation with two new features: traders may face a cost of contacting the intermediary, and consumption needs may be correlated across traders. We show that each feature is capable of generating an equilibrium in which some (but not all)...