Economic growth involves metamorphosis of the financial system. Forms of banks and bank money change. These changes, if not addressed, leave the banking system vulnerable to crisis. There is no greater challenge in economics than to understand and prevent financial crises. The financial crisis...

Short-term collateralized debt, such as demand deposits and money market instruments - private money, is efficient if agents are willing to lend without producing costly information about the collateral backing the debt. When the economy relies on such informationally-insensitive debt, firms...

The current literature has provided a number of important insights about the effects of macroeconomic data releases on monetary policy expectations and asset prices. However, one puzzling aspect of that literature is that the estimated responses are quite small. Indeed, these studies typically...

Estimating the response of asset prices to changes in monetary policy is complicated by the endogeneity of policy decisions and the fact that both interest rates and asset prices react to numerous other variables. This paper develops a new estimator that is based on the heteroskedasticity that...

Movements in the prices of different assets are likely to directly influence one another. This paper develops a model that identifies the contemporaneous interactions between asset prices in U.S. financial markets by relying on the heteroskedasticity in their movements. In particular, we...

This paper re-examines the relationship between financial variables and real activity in a unified statistical framework. Using the methods of cointegration and separation. we characterize the long-run and short-run relationships between three sets of variables and then use the framework to...

Movements in the stock market can have a significant impact on the macroeconomy and are therefore likely to be an important factor in the determination of monetary policy. However, little is known about the magnitude of the Federal Reserve's reaction to the stock market. One reason is that it is...

This article evaluates a large collection of systemic risk measures based on their ability to predict macroeconomic downturns. We evaluate 19 measures of systemic risk in the US and Europe spanning several decades. We propose dimension reduction estimators for constructing systemic risk indexes...

We study a market for funding real investment in which valuation creates information on which adverse selection can occur. Unlike in previous models, higher amounts of valuation are associated with lower market prices and so greater returns to valuation, and this strategic complementarity in the...

Estimating the effect of Federal Reserve's announcements of Large-Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programs on corporate credit risk is complicated by the simultaneity of policy decisions and movements in prices of risky financial assets, as well as by the fact that both interest rates of assets...