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Discusses the commercial paper market, wherein corporations and foreign governments issue short-term unsecured promissory notes. Importance of the market; Characteristics and features of commercial paper; Major market participants; Risks and risk control; Asset-backed commercial paper; Swaps; Global market.

Discusses about monetary policy in a constitutional democracy. Historical background about monetary arrangements in Britain and the United States; How the discretionary control of money by the states undermined property rights; Discretionary control of inflation in the 1970s; How Federal Reserves fiscal transfers circumvent constitutionally mandated budget process.

Focuses on economic issues related to electronic benefit transfer (EBT). Impact of EBT on the payment structure of the United States; Report cost/benefit results based on EBT pilot programs; Changes in payment structure from EBT; Effect of scale economies on future EBT costs.

The article introduces a method for computing equilibrium in dynamic heterogeneous-agent economies by including an entire distribution if finite-dimensional or a fine approximation if it is infinite-dimensional, as a state variable. Topics covered include the capability of the model in accurately computing equilibrium, the feasibility of the model for an economy where households face occasionally binding constraints, and the application of Smolyak's algorithm presented in the paper.

The article discusses various articles published within the issue, including one by Huberto Ennis and Todd Keister on 1983 bank runs model developed by Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, one by Edward Green on the role of limited liability and optimality of bailout combined for early liquidation, and one by Ricardo Cavalcanti on monetary and banking theories.

The article discusses sovereign defaults. History has been mired by sovereign defaults such as Russia's 1998 default that jump-started other similar events. A number of studies have been carried out to understand the issue, yet, the author notes that much has to be learned. Low resources, high borrowing costs, and political changes in the sovereign have led to defaults. The author believes that understanding the economics of the issue will lead to the comprehension of emerging economies.

Part I. Presents an essay about the late Benjamin Strong, the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1914-1928. Context of Strong's imperialism; Goal of the Federal Reserve System's founders; Roots of Strong's policies during the 1920s; Stance taken by Strong about Europe's financial predicament.

Part II. Presents an essay about Benjamin Strong, the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and his economic policies in the 1920s. Role played by Strong's economic policies in the Great Depression; Limitations that restricted Strong's commitment in assisting Europe to financial recovery; Reasons behind Strong's reluctance to take major risks to facilitate Europe's economic recovery.

The article focuses on the changes in the U.S. retail payments including rise in the debit and credit card payment value. It discusses the increase in Automated Clearing House (ACH), increase in cash, as technological innovations are making security of debit and credit cards readily available, and economists suggesting elimination of paper currency.

Discusses various aspects of John Wheatley's theory of international monetary adjustment. Integration of quantity theory, purchasing power parity doctrine and the notion of gold arbitrage; Treatment of exchange rate depreciations, gold price premia and specie drains; Distinction between large and small open economy models.

Provides insights on bankers acceptances in the United States. Creation of a bankers acceptance; Bankers acceptances and the Federal Reserve System; Market for bankers acceptances; Outlook for bankers acceptances.

The article focuses on theoretical considerations regarding net asset values (NAV) for money market funds in the U.S. It states that money market funds are open-end mutual funds invest in short-term high-credit-quality debt tools as commercial paper and deposit. It presents two models or two alternative interpretation of the economic function by money funds.

The article offers the authors' insights regarding the effects of gross domestic products (GDP)-indexed sovereign debt. They state that GDP-indexation has several benefits including its elimination of debt and income defaults, lessen the likelihood of fiscal crises for governments that experiencing a countercyclical borrowing cost, and increase indebtedness from 4% to 18% of mean income. They mention that one of its disadvantages is the moral hazard problems that it may introduce.

The article discusses the quantity theory tradition, which documents the association of real and monetary disorder. It says that the behavior of the monetary aggregates in Europe generates monetarist criticisms, while the growth rate of money in Great Britain has declined in late 2007. It mentions that David Hume has expressed the empirical correlations used by quantity theorists to support the hypothesis of longer-run neutrality and short-run nonneutrality of money.

The article focuses on whether inequality is determined solely through a natural process or through the interaction of innate differences with man-made institutions and policies. It examines modern quantitative economics providing a wide set of powerful tools, which enable researchers to build laboratories in which various hypotheses regarding origins and consequences of inequality can be studied. It informs that U.S. economy today provides ample motivation for studying distributional issues.

The article assesses the extent to which interest rate changes in credit markets reflect changes in monetary policy in the U.S. A panel of time series with interest rate changes is made that use principal component analysis to characterize co-movement across these changes. It was found that the common variation in interest rate changes for most of the series is highly correlated with federal funds rate. It suggests that common movements in interest rates reflect changes in monetary policy.

The article focuses on the issues with the financial safety net protecting debt holders as well as depositors of financial institutions in the U.S. It is noted that the recession has recreated much of the intellectual and policymaking environment despite the progress happening in macroeconomics modeling. The author stresses the presence of the short-term emphasis given on financial intermediation revival along with the depression.

The article discusses the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) including its history, structural estimation, and its implications of the nominal rigidities. It notes that statistical relationship between inflation and unemployment is correlated to low employment outcomes. It mentions that policymakers agreed that the objective effect of monetary policy should be low and constant inflation in 1970. However, results of a survey show that NKPC has no agreement on nominal price rigidities in the aggregate economy. Furthermore, it suggests that research between the relevance of unemployment and inflation will remain as an active theory in the area of macroeconomics.

The article reports on the trends, market changes and regulation on the compensation of the chief executive officers (CEO) in the U.S. It states that the main economic problem behind executive compensation design is that company owners need to align the incentives of the CEO to their own interests, typically to maximize firm value. It says that the trend used by the firms to pay their top executives includes a salary, bonus program, stock grants, grants of options on the stock of the company and long-term incentive plans that specify retirement and severance payments, as well as pension plans and deferred benefits.

The article focuses on nominal frictions and relative price adjustments, and the limits to monetary policy in the U.S. It states that if prices or wages are sticky in only one sector of an economy, and if there is no heterogeneity across regions, the monetary policy can loosen the effects of price stickiness. However, if there is more than one sector with sticky prices, the nominal rigidities cause distortions under any monetary policy. The author also described several examples of distortions, such as frictions in labor market or monopoly power in goods markets.

The article reports on the individual income inequality trends in the U.S. It is stated that between 1975 and 2002, only labor income in the top 10 percent of the income distribution increased more than the per-worker wage and salary income. It also shows that there is an increasing inequality between both males and females, and the inequality between the two groups has been decreasing. Furthermore, it is revealed that income differentials have increased both between and within the levels of education of the group.

The article presents a historical evidence indicating that the availability of small change was a problem around the turn of the 18th century in Argentina. Buenos Aires maintained a trade deficit with Spain during most of the early colonial period. This deficit caused a constant outflow of gold and silver. The constant outflow of coins from the harbor of Buenos Aires was viewed as causing significant liquidity crises in the area of the Rio de la Plata.

Explains the reason wage inequality has been increasing in the U.S. Effect of technical innovation on wage distribution in the country; Views and arguments raised by economists on wage inequality; Factors that driving the increasing disparity in wages.

Analyzes the economic fundamentals of bank runs in the U.S. Alternative theoretical explanations for the determinants of bank runs; Model of bank runs that is standard in the economic literature; Conditions under which multiple equilibria arise; Policy implications of bank runs.

Considers some issues relating to the prospective policy measures of the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in 2003. Difficulty faced by BOJ because of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates; Details of how monetary policy can be conducted in a situation with interest rates near zero; Issue concerning the balance of payment.

Considers the roles of economic theory and empirical evidence in bringing about changes in monetary policy formulation. Outline of the general analytic trends in macroeconomics; Evolution of monetary policymaking in practice; Conclusion.

Discusses the development and application of monetary policy frameworks and indicators for the United States Federal Reserve Board in the 1920s. Description of the quantity theory-monetary cycle framework; Information on the framework created by the Federal Reserve; Criticism against the framework selection of the Federal Reserve.

Discusses the impact of the information technology revolution on the production structure of the economy. Total factor productivity (TFP); Factor-specific productivity (FSP); Effects of TSP and FSP change.

Presents a study which reviewed several researches made on the frequency and costs of individual price adjustment. Discussion on the administered price concept introduced by Frederick Mills in his study published in 1927; Examination of the explicit cost of price adjustment; Discussion on the findings of a study conducted by Mark J. Zbaracki et al. in 2000, which examined the costs of the administrative process and indirect cost associated with changing customer behavior.

Presents information on the doctrinal history of mercantilist and classical monetary doctrines in the United States Federal Reserve Board. Details on several laws and policy governing the the issue; Distinction between absolute and relative prices; Debate on currency school and banking school; Discussion on Keynesian revolution and monetarist counter-revolution.

Analyzes the group lending and financial intermediation practice of banks in third world communities. Underlying idea behind group lending and intermediation; Examination of the viability of the practice in helping financially the low-income communities in the United States; Theoretical framework used by the author in studying the subject.

Explores the role of the Federal Reserve (Fed) in the payment system. Discussion on electronic payment presentment (ECP); Payment system as a communications industry; Economics of communication industries; Fed's role as a system innovator; Features of check collection.

Focuses on the experiment conducted on the pre-commitment approach to bank capital regulation which is a radical departure from existing bank regulatory methods. Background information on pre-commitment approach; Menus of contracts; Description of the model used in the study; Numerical examples used; Conclusions.

Analyzes the relevance of personal saving behavior as an indicator of real economic growth. Concentration and measurement of household wealth; Debt; Empirical data on the relation between investment and saving rates; Models of Solow, Lucas, and Greenwood and Jovanovic.

Develops a number of alternative empirical measures of the real rate of interest. Controversy over the behavior of the real rate; Real rate series from inflation forecasts made by the Data Resources Incorporated (DRI) and by the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; Comparison with forecasts from the Michigan Survey of Consumers and the Livingston Survey.

Suggests that the effects of monetary disturbances differ across sectors when some prices can adjust more rapidly than others. Monetary shocks in a model economy possessing different speeds of price adjustment; Effect of households' willingness to substitute goods across sectors.

Reviews leading assumptions on the effect of M2 as an intermediate target for monetary policy. Statistical evidence; Feldstein stock analysis; Reduce form variance.

The article offers the author's insights on investigating the importance and size of the non-owner occupant housing market before the housing crisis. He says that he used two measures of mortgage performance to explore the impact of the housing crisis on non-owner occupants such as foreclosure rates, and prevalence and performance index. He defines a second homeowner as a person, who buys a non-primary residence for recreational use.

This article presents two simple calculations aimed at providing a first step in quantifying the costs of unanticipated financial shocks to a household. The two types of shocks considered are (1) an unanticipated drop in net worth and (2) an unexpected increase in the interest rate on borrowing. The shocks are faced by households in a life-cycle consumption-savings model and the costs are measured in terms of annual consumption. In general, for empirically plausible shocks, the results show that net worth shocks are substantially costlier than interest rate shocks. The costs of the shocks also vary systematically with the age of the household, with the net worth shock being especially costly for older households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

K-core inflation is a new class of underlying inflation measures. The two most popular measures of underlying inflation are core inflation and trimmed mean inflation. The former removes fixed categories of goods and services (food and energy) from the inflation calculation, and the latter removes fixed percentiles of the weighted distribution of price changes. In contrast, k-core inflation specifies a size of relative price change to be removed from the inflation calculation. Thus, the categories and percentiles to be removed vary with each period's distribution of relative price changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conduct an accounting exercise of the changes in aggregate employment, unemployment, and out of labor force (OLF) among 25-64-year-old men from 1968-2010. We decompose the observed changes in these labor market outcomes into changes in the sociodemographic composition of the population and changes in the labor market outcomes of different sociodemographic groups. Using the results of the decomposition, we predict that the OLF-to-population ratio for men will increase to 16 percent in 2015, up from 14.7 percent in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the financial frictions approach in a general equilibrium model to examine business cycle fluctuations. It mentions that the equilibrium model studies sticky wages, adjustment costs in investment, and capital utilization for business fluctuations. It highlights the ideas which have been formalized in the macroeconomic models during past two decades.

The article focuses on factors driving income inequality, which has potentially enormous welfare consequences in the U.S. It examines a broad set of facts from international data on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as a measure of welfare across countries. It studies the recent literature in growth economics, addressing the facts on income differences across countries, and the differences in the allocation of factors of production and productivity across heterogeneous production units.

The article focuses on the issue of time consistency associated with government policies toward large insolvent financial institutions. It presents a model which illustrates how time consistency problems are developed as well as looks at how the government's policy towards financial firms is determined by the spillover effects impacting the macroeconomy as a whole. Various policy tools along their potential in eliminating time inconsistency issues are discussed.

The article focuses on the legal protection to foreign investors. It looks at the international investment agreements as well as explores the legal protection that are accorded by the issuance of sovereign debt in international financial centers to lenders. It illustrates the defects in the legal protection for foreign investors, noting the unfavorable rulings of international arbitration courts. The legal protection for holders of debt in default is examined.

The article focuses on the issue of the suggestion to increase inflation rate targets of central banks. It presents an analysis of the optimal steady-state inflation rate in the absence of zero lower bound (ZLB), distinguishing benefits of Friedman-rule value of deflation and the Calvo-model value of zero. Also discussed are the type of distortion in the mainstream New Keynesian literature, the significant role of central banks, and other political-economy issues related to the topic.

The article focuses on the impact of sectoral shocks on aggregate economic activity. It explores the role of sectoral shares in the determination of an economic sector's contribution to aggregate variations as well as illustrates how input-output linkages in production affect the propagation and amplification of sectoral shocks through the use of canonical mulltisector growth models. The propagation of sectoral shocks to other economic sectors and its impact on aggregate output is investigated.