We study the role of war bonds and inflation in the presidential elections of the 1950s. During World War II, the federal government conducted aggressive campaigns to convince Americans to invest their savings in wartime savings bonds. Although the bonds were nonnegotiable and protected from...

I investigate a model of the U.S. economy with nominal rigidities and a financial accelerator mechanism à la Bernanke et al. (1999). I calculate total factor productivity and monetary policy deviations for the U.S. and quantitatively explore the ability of the model to account for the cyclical...

The strategic prospects for the US (or any) economy can be evaluated by reference to the financial balances of its main sectors, which are related to one another by a consistent accounting system. The 1992-2000 expansion, accompanied by a rising budget surplus, was greeted by a storm of...

This paper adopts a novel approach to studying the evolution of interest rate term structure over the U.S. business cycles and to predicting recessions. Applying an effective algorithm, I classify the Treasury yield curve into distinct shapes and find the less frequent shapes intrinsically...

For over two centuries, the municipal bond market has been a source of systemic risk, which returned early in the COVID-19 downturn when borrowing from securities markets became costly for many private and public entities, and some found it difficult to borrow at all. Indeed, just before the Fed...

Approximately 4800 municipal bond issuers defaulted on interest or principal payments during the Great Depression. Although municipal bond defaults have been quite rare over the last 70 years, some commentators have suggested that another large wave of municipal bond defaults will occur in the...