As the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation's experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed's full history (1914 to...

As the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation‘s experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed‘s full history (1914 to...

Although its role has been overlooked by monetary historians, a two-cent tax on bank checks effective from June 1932 through December 1934 appears to have been an important contributing factor to that period's severe monetary contraction. According to our estimates, the currency-demand deposit...

I show how to estimate and identify a large-scale vector autoregression when the variables in a subset of the system are mutually independent after conditioning on a separate set of variables (diagonality), and when the conditioning variables are independent of the former subset (block...