In September 1997, the U.S. Treasury developed the TIPS market in order to achieve three important policy objectives: (1) to provide consumers with a class of assets that allows for hedging against real interest rate risk, (2) to provide holders of nominal contracts a means of hedging against...

What is the output of financial institutions? And how can we measure their nominal and, more importantly, real value, especially since many financial services are provided without explicit charges? This paper summarizes the theoretical result that, to correctly impute the nominal value of...

This paper utilizes a new flow measure of the true output of bank services to analyze the impact of mergers on the cost and productivity of Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1987-1999. It shows that there are conceptual problems in the output measures used in previous studies, which...

This paper uses a new measure of bank service output to estimate various specifications of production and cost functions for Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1986 to 1999. The new output series is a true flow measure of bank service value added, and it follows from a unified model...

This paper constructs a new measure of output for Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) over the period 1986 to 1999. This flow measure of bank value added follows from a unified model of bank operation that integrates theories of production, financial intermediation, and asset pricing. The primary...

This paper presents a model in which financial innovations explain three widely discussed stylized facts regarding trends in economic volatility over the past two decades. Aggregate volatility of real variables such as output has fallen. In particular, the covariance between firm and industry...

This policy brief summarizes the findings of the Survey of Community Banks conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in May 2010. This survey seeks to understand how the supply of, and demand for, bank business loans changed in the period following the financial crisis. The survey design...

The measurement of bank output, a difficult and contentious issue, has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years. In this paper, we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank...

This paper addresses the proper measurement of financial service output that is not priced explicitly. It shows how to impute nominal service output from financial intermediaries' interest income, and how to construct price indices for those financial services. We model financial intermediaries...