As the one-hundredth 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...

As the one-hundredth 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...

Although its role has been overlooked by monetary historians, a two-cent tax on bank checks effective from June 1932 through December 1934 appears to have been an important contributing factor to that period's severe monetary contraction. According to our estimates, the currency-demand deposit...

I show how to estimate and identify a large-scale vector autoregression when the variables in a subset of the system are mutually independent after conditioning on a separate set of variables (diagonality), and when the conditioning variables are independent of the former subset (block...

We use Texas's constitutional amendment in 1997 that expanded the scope of home equity loans as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the effects of relaxing credit constraints on small businesses. We find, using standard panel data methods and restricted-use micro-data from the US Census...

This papers examines the potential link between household credit shocks and income inequality at the national level. For a sample of 32 developed and developing countries, we show that aggregate consumption temporarily increases in the short run and decreases in the long run in the face of...

We estimate the effect of asylum seekers on house prices in England and Wales from 2004 to 2015, and find, using panel data and time series methods, that the government's dispersal policies have had small but statistically significant negative effects on housing prices, especially for...

We propose an alternative measure of system-wide connectedness to the popular generalized spillover index, based on generalized forecast error variance decompositions, of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2104). Our measure relies on joint conditional forecasts to decompose variance, as opposed to the...