As the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation’s experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed’s full history (1914 to present)...

We estimate how spending in Texas responded to a 1997 constitutional amendment that relaxed severe restrictions on home equity lending. We use this event as a natural experiment to estimate the importance of credit constraints. If households are credit-constrained, such an increase in credit...

This article empirically re-examines the importance of the cost channel of monetary transmission-the effect of money supply shocks on the costs of production and supply, as opposed to the traditional effect on demand. Unlike Barth and Ramey (2002), this article identifies the response of...

ABSTRACT We estimate the relationship between mental health drug prescriptions and the level of labor market activity in the USA. Based on monthly data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey of physicians and aggregated by US census regions, we find that the number of mental health...