The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 alters the competitive structure of the debit card payment processing industry and caps debit card interchange fees for banks with over $10 billion in assets. Market participants predicted that debit...

This paper examines how the quality of firm information disclosure affects shareholders' use of dividends to mitigate agency problems. Managerial compensation is linked to firm value. However, because the manager and shareholders are asymmetrically informed, the manager can manipulate the firm's...

Cagan's classic currency ratio suggests that underground economic activity in the U.S. surged starting in 1994. In contrast, we show that a ratio adjusted to take care of two distorting developments -- retail sweep programs and overseas demand for U.S. currency -- did not surge, and that...

This paper develops a model of the financial system that provides a framework for analyzing monetary policy implementation in a world with multiple Federal Reserve liabilities and a superabundant supply of reserves. The analysis demonstrates that the Federal Reserve's suite of policy tools...

Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve's use of unconventional monetary policy tools has led it to hold a large portfolio of securities. The securities holdings in excess of historical norms have been shown to be putting downward pressure on longer-term interest rates. One question asked...

Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve's use of unconventional monetary policy tools has led it to hold a large portfolio of securities. The asset purchases are intended to put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, but also affect the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and income....

This paper examines the current thinking on exchange-rate pass-through to both import prices and consumer prices and estimates the extent to which they have fallen in the G-7 countries since the late 1970s and 1980s. For import-price pass-through we find that all countries experience a numerical...

This paper takes an in-depth look at U.S. direct investment valuation adjustments. We develop a methodology to generate valuation adjustments at the quarterly frequency, which can be combined with the Bureau of Economic Analysis's quarterly direct investment flows to obtain quarterly estimates...

This paper examines exchange-rate exposure of multinationals (MNEs) in light of detailed exchange rate data. Specifically, using MNE-specific exchange rates and accounting for the possibility that exchange-rate crises may impact a firm differently than periods of normal fluctuations, estimates...

This paper examines if the type of exchange rate used or size of the movement in the exchange rate matters in estimating exchange-rate exposure of U.S. nonfinancial multinationals. We find that switching from a broad trade-weighted exchange rate to a 2-digit SIC industry exchange rate increases...