Understanding the changing role of central banks and the novel policies they have pursued recently is absolutely essential for analysing many economic, financial and political issues, ranging from financial regulation and crisis, to exchange rate dynamics and regime changes, and QE and prolonged...

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...

Post-crisis reforms changed the location of safe asset production. I propose a pair of tests to identify who issues safe assets and which safe asset issuers opportunistically time issuance when the price of safe assets is high. The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) system is a newly crucial safe...

This paper studies the effect of low interest rates on financial intermediation and the transmission of monetary policy. Using U.S. bank- and branch-level data, I document two new facts: first, the long-run decline in bond rates has not been fully passed through to loan rates; second, the...

We examine banking competition when deposit or loan contracts contingent on macroeconomic shocks become feasible. We show that the risk allocation is efficient, provided that banks are not bailed out. In this case, banks may shift part of the risk to depositors. The private sector insures the...

We consider the business strategy of some banks that provide relationship loans (where they have loan origination and monitoring advantages relative to capital markets) with core deposit funding (where they can pass along the benefit of a sticky price on deposits). These quot;traditional...

Exploiting a unique and original dataset of 11,945 payments made from March to May 2005, the paper estimates the determinants of the probability of a transaction being paid by cash, check or bank card at the point of sale. Controlling for individual characteristics, the main results of the paper...

A deterioration in the link between the M2 monetary aggregate and GDP, along with large errors in predicting M2 growth, led the Board of Governors to downgrade the M2 aggregate as a reliable indicator of monetary policy in 1993. In this paper, we argue that the financial condition of depository...

This paper studies the question to what extent premia for macroeconomic risks in banking are sufficient to avoid banking crises. We investigate a competitive banking system embedded in an overlapping generation model subject to repeated macroeconomic shocks. We show that even if banks fully...

The nineteenth-century economist Walter Bagehot maintained that in order to prevent bank panics a central bank should provide liquidity to the market at a very high rate of interest. This recommendation seems to be in sharp contrast with the policy adopted by the Federal Reserve after September...