[...]In the first half of the paper, we review the significantchanges in the housing finance system over the past thirty yearsand discuss the implications of these changes for the cost andavailability of mortgage credit. In the second half, we present atwo-part econometric analysis of the...

The volatility of real GDP growth in the United States hasfallen by half since the early 1980s relative to the priorpostwar experience.1 Inflation also stabilized around then(although only when compared with a shorter period ofvolatility in the 1970s). Some studies have argued that animprovement...

[...]This paper looks for evidence of both types of crediteffects—those that are endogenous to the monetarymechanism and those that are exogenous—using informationon banks’ commercial credit standards as a proxy for bankcredit availability. We compare results from an...

[...]This paper investigates whether the cyclical effects ofmonetary policy have been influenced by the secular growth insecuritization in recent decades. In particular, when the centralbank makes a specific monetary policy move—such asincreasing the overnight interbank rate by 50 basis...

[...]This article develops a stylized game-theoretical model toanalyze banks’ intraday liquidity management behavior in anRTGS environment. It analyzes the strategic incentives under Envision an economy with two identical banks using an RTGSsystem operated by the central bank to settle...

[...]This article explores in several ways the structure andvocabulary of emerging payments system risks and theirmitigation. We begin by recounting several incidents of fraudand losses associated with emerging payment methods. Wethen describe an economic framework for understanding riskcontrol...

[...]This article investigates whether changes in the termpremium tend to distort the term spread’s recession signals.3We begin by decomposing the term spread into an expectationscomponent and a term premium component, based on the Kimand Wright (2005) term premium estimates. Next, we...

The four-year rise in the U.S. poverty rate that began withthe recession of 2001 and the images of devastation fromNew Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has led to a renewedinterest in poverty among researchers and policymakers.Mayors of large cities have been prominent in the reneweddiscussion....

[...]This article examines the U.S. Treasury’s decision tointroduce a new financial instrument—Treasury bills—in1929. We show that Treasury officials were willing to committhe resources required to introduce the new security in orderto mitigate several flaws in the structure of Treasury...

[...]This article examines how the nature and characteristics ofhedge funds may generate “market failures” that make CCRMfor exposures to hedge funds intrinsically more difficult tomanage, both for the individual firm and for policymakersconcerned with systemic risk. We put forward no...