The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight- money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and external funds-- enhances the effects of...

The importance of financial markets and international capital flows have increased greatly since the 1990s. How does this affect the effectiveness of monetary policy? We analyse the transmission of monetary policy in two important financial centres, the United States and the United Kingdom....

We provide causal evidence that discount rate changes by the Federal Reserve affected economic output in the 1920s. Our identification strategy exploits county-level variation in access to the Fed's discount window, and we implement this strategy with hand-collected data on banking and...

This paper evaluates the role of redistribution in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy to consumption. Three channels affect aggregate spending when winners and losers have different marginal propensities to consume: an earnings heterogeneity channel from unequal income gains, a Fisher...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on stock returns in narrow windows around press releases by the Federal Reserve. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and an indirect (network) effect. We attribute 50%-85% of the...

This paper studies the synchronization of financial cycles across 17 advanced economies over the past 150 years. The comovement in credit, house prices, and equity prices has reached historical highs in the past three decades. The sharp increase in the comovement of global equity markets is...

We study the transmission of monetary policy shocks in a model in which realistic heterogeneity in price rigidity interacts with heterogeneity in sectoral size and input-output linkages, and derive conditions under which these heterogeneities generate large real effects. Empirically,...

How much ability does the Fed have to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates? We argue that the presence of substantial debt in fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages means that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates depends not just on their current level but also on...

This paper studies how the impact of monetary policy depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing mortgages. We show that the efficacy of monetary policy is state dependent, varying in a systematic way with the pool of potential savings from refinancing. We construct a quantitative...

We provide empirical evidence of a novel liquidity-based transmission mechanism through which monetary policy influences asset markets, develop a model of this mechanism, and assess the ability of the quantitative theory to match the evidence