We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary policy over the 1960 - 2000 period. We document the introduction of monetarism, rational expectations, credibility, transparency, and other monetary policy...

We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on banking policy in the 1950s and 1960s. We document that demand for research and analysis was driven by banking industry developments and legal changes that required the...

The decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System is evaluated as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary and financial policy. The role of the Reserve Banks starting in the 1960s is emphasized. The introduction of monetarism in the 1960s, rational expectations in...

A large amount of activity in the financial sector occurs in secondary financial markets, where securities are traded among investors without capital flowing to firms. The stock market is the archetypal example, which in most developed economies captures a lot of attention and resources. Is the...

This paper provides, for the first time, large-scale evidence that liquidity transformation by banks creates fragility, as their uninsured depositors face an incentive to withdraw their money before others (a so-called panic run). Such fragility manifests itself in stronger sensitivity of...

This paper studies the optimal determination of deposit insurance when bank runs are possible. We show that the welfare impact of changes in the level of deposit insurance coverage can be generally expressed in terms of a small number of sufficient statistics, which include the level of losses...

Big data is revolutionizing the finance industry and has the potential to significantly shape future research in finance. This special issue contains articles following the 2019 NBER/ RFS conference on big data. In this Introduction to the special issue, we define the "Big Data" phenomenon as a...

Modern information technologies have greatly facilitated timely dissemination of information to a broad base of investors at low costs. To examine their effects on the real economy, we exploit the staggered implementation of the EDGAR system from 1993 to 1996 as a shock to information...

In the decade following the financial crisis of 2008, investment funds in corporate bond markets became prominent market players and generated concerns of financial fragility. The COVID-19 crisis provides an opportunity to inspect their resilience in a major stress event. Using daily microdata,...

We study how heterogeneity in banks' asset holdings affects fragility. In the model, banks face a risk of bank runs and have to liquidate long-term assets in a common market to repay runners. Liquidation prices are depressed when many banks sell their assets at the same time. When banks are...