Foreign-exchange-market intervention is generally ineffective when undertaken independent of monetary policy. But when undertaken as a goal of monetary policy, exchange-rate management can compromise price stability. This Economic Commentary explains the difficulties of implementing an...

Do hedge funds help or hurt the financial markets in which they operate? The highly publicized troubles of Long Term Capital Management have once again focused the attention of policymakers and the press on the hedge fund industry and the cry for its regulation. This Economic Commentary refutes...

The increasingly controversial Exchange Stabilization Fund is used to influence the international value of the U.S. dollar and to provide aid to foreign countries. The debate surrounding the Fund will become more informed, the authors suggest, when observers understand how to calculate the total...

An analysis of how central-bank exchange-market intervention can affect both the level of exchange rates and the risk premium in asset returns, showing how the risk premium is related to the conditional variances of intervention and other exogenous processes.

Research has generally failed to find reliable connections between official exchange-market interventions and exchange rates that are consistent with either a monetary or a portfolio-balance theory of exchange-rate determination. Recently economists have suggested that intervention might...

I perform an empirical analysis of Euler equations for the firm's choices of capital, labor, hours, and debt. Financial structure has real effects , since taxes favor debt. However, the cost of debt increases with the debt-to-collateral ratio, and capital is part of collateral. The data, for...

An assessment of how banks adjust to increased capital requirements, illustrated by a model of a bank's choice of optimal leverage.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of commercial bank holdings of municipal securities (munis) from June 1985 through December 1988, using the FFIEC's Reports of Condition and income. While motivated by previous analyses suggesting that a shift from munis to taxable securities is a...

An analysis of the differential impacts of reported and actual U.S. foreign exchange intervention on the mean and conditional variance of the Deutschemark-to-dollar and yen-to-dollar exchange rates. For part of the sample period, the impact of intervention on the variance of the exchange rates...

An analysis of a q model of investment in which financial structure affects firm value, using a perfect foresight model of general equilibrium that includes a debt-related agency cost; uses the comparative statics and dynamics of changing the corporate tax rate as an illustration.