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This paper studies the optimal design of a liability-sharing arrangement as an infinitely repeated game. We construct a noncooperative model with two agents: one active and one passive. The active agent can take a costly and unobservable action to reduce the incidence of crisis, but a crisis is costly for both agents. When a crisis occurs, each agent decides unilaterally how much to contribute mitigating it. For the one-shot game, when the avoidance cost is too high relative to the expected loss of crisis for the active agent, the first-best is not achievable. That is, the active agent cannot be induced to put in effort to minimize the incidence of crisis in a static game. We show that with the same stage-game environment, the first-best cannot be implemented as a perfect public equilibrium (PPE) of the infinitely repeated game either. Instead, at any constrained efficient PPE, the active agent "shirks" infinitely often, and when crisis happens, the active agent is "bailed out" infinitely often. The frequencies of crisis and bailout are endogenously determined in equilibrium. The welfare optimal equilibrium being characterized by recurrent crises and bailouts is consistent with historical episodes of financial crises, which features varying frequency and varied external responses for troubled institutions and countries in the real world. We explore some comparative statics of the PPEs of the repeated game numerically. This paper studies the optimal design of a liability-sharing arrangement as an infinitely repeated game. We construct a noncooperative model with two agents: one active and one passive. The active agent can take a costly and unobservable action to reduce the incidence of crisis, but a crisis is costly for both agents. When a crisis occurs, each agent decides unilaterally how much to contribute mitigating it. For the one-shot game, when the avoidance cost is too high relative to the expected loss of crisis for the active agent, the first-best is not achievable. That is, the active agent cannot be induced to put in effort to minimize the incidence of crisis in a static game. We show that with the same stage-game environment, the first-best cannot be implemented as a perfect public equilibrium (PPE) of the infinitely repeated game either. Instead, at any constrained efficient PPE, the active agent "shirks" infinitely often, and when crisis happens, the active agent is "bailed out" infinitely often. The frequencies of crisis and bailout are endogenously determined in equilibrium. The welfare optimal equilibrium being characterized by recurrent crises and bailouts is consistent with historical episodes of financial crises, which features varying frequency and varied external responses for troubled institutions and countries in the real world. We explore some comparative statics of the PPEs of the repeated game numerically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the financial crisis and recession induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, many investment-grade firms became unable to borrow from securities markets. In response, the Fed not only reopened its commercial paper funding facility but also announced it would purchase newly issued and seasoned bonds of corporations rated as investment grade before the COVID pandemic. A careful splicing of different unemployment rate series enables us to assess the effectiveness of recent Fed interventions in these longterm debt markets over long sample periods, spanning the Great Depression, Great Recession and COVID Recession. Findings indicate that the announcement of forthcoming corporate bond backstop facilities had helped stop risk premia from rising further than they had by late-March 2020. In doing so, these Fed facilities have limited the role of external finance premia in amplifying the macroeconomic impact of the COVID pandemic. Nevertheless, the corporate bond programs blend the roles of the Federal Reserve in conducting monetary policy via its balance sheet, acting as a lender of last resort and pursuing credit policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many central banks whose exchange rate regimes are classified as flexible are reluctant to let the exchange rate fluctuate. This phenomenon is known as "fear of floating". We present a simple theory in which fear of floating emerges as an optimal policy outcome. The key feature of the model is an occasionally binding borrowing constraint linked to the exchange rate that introduces a feedback loop between aggregate demand and credit conditions. Contrary to the Mundellian paradigm, we show that a depreciation can be contractionary, and letting the exchange rate float can expose the economy to self-fulfilling crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops methods for the production and evaluation of censored density forecasts. Censored density forecasts quantify forecast risks in a middle region of the density covering a specified probability, and ignore the magnitude but not the frequency of outlying observations. We propose a new estimator that fits a potentially skewed and fat-tailed density to the inner observations, acknowledging that the outlying observations may be drawn from a different but unknown distribution. We also introduce a new test for calibration of censored density forecasts. An application using historical forecast errors from the Federal Reserve Board and the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England illustrates the utility of censored density forecasts when quantifying forecast risks after shocks such as the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor input growth during the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession of 2008-2009 has been considerably lower than expected. A number of scholars have attributed this disappointing outcome to the prospect of higher taxes, induced by the fiscal imbalances that will materialize in coming decades under current policies. The paper examines this fiscal sentiment hypothesis from the perspective of a neoclassical growth model, under the assumption that the typical household's preferences can be represented by a utility function that implies a constant intertemporal (Frisch) elasticity of substitution for aggregate hours of work, and for a hypothetical tax regime that incorporates the Congressional Budget Office's assessment of the U.S. fiscal situation. The paper finds that the empirical relevance of the fiscal sentiment hypothesis depends on whether this Frisch elasticity of labor supply is closer to the relatively large values needed to account for the observed volatility of labor input at business cycle frequencies, than to the lower values estimated by microeconomic and quasi-experimental studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies systemic risk in the interbank market. We first establish that in the German interbank lending market, a few large banks intermediate funding flows between many smaller periphery banks and that shocks to these intermediary banks in the financial crisis spill over to the activities of the periphery banks. We then develop a network model in which banks trade off the costs and benefits of link formation to explain these patterns. The model is structurally estimated using banks’ preferences as revealed by the observed network structure in the precrisis period. It explains why the interbank intermediation arrangement arises, estimates the frictions underlying the arrangement, and quantifies how shocks are transmitted across the network. Model estimates based on precrisis data successfully predict changes in networklinks and in lending arising from the crisis in out-of-sample tests. Finally, we quantify the systemic risk of a single intermediary and the impact of ECB funding in reducing this risk through model counterfactuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. economy isn't recovering from the deep Great Recession of 2008-2009 with the strength predicted by models that incorporate a variety of shocks and frictions in the basic analytical framework of the neoclassical growth model. It has been argued that the counterfactual predictions shouldn't be attributed to inherent features of that framework, but to the omission from the analysis of the prospects of an imminent switch to a higher taxes regime prompted by the unprecedented fiscal challenges faced by the U.S. economy in peacetime. The paper explores quantitatively this fiscal sentiment hypothesis. The main finding is that the hypothesis can account for a substantial fraction of the decline in investment and labor input in the aftermath of the Great Recession, relative to their pre-recession trends. These results require, however, a qualification: The perceived higher taxes must fall almost exclusively on capital income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the inability to use monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilization leaves a government more vulnerable to a rollover crisis. We study a sovereign default model with selfful fulfilling rollover crises, foreign currency debt, and nominal rigidities. When the government lacks monetary autonomy, lenders anticipate that the government will face a severe recession in the event of a liquidity crisis, and are therefore more prone to run on government bonds. By contrast, a government with monetary autonomy can stabilize the economy and can easily remain immune to a rollover crisis. In a quantitative application, we find that the lack of monetary autonomy played a central role in making the Eurozone vulnerable to a rollover crisis. A lender of last resort can help ease the costs from giving up monetary independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is increasingly a core component of corporate strategy in the global economy. In recent years its importance has become even greater, primarily because of the financial scandals, investors' losses, and reputational damage to listed companies. While corporations are busy adopting and enhancing CSR practices, there is (beyond very few notable exceptions) no established empirical research on CSR's impact and relevance in the capital market. This paper investigates this issue by tracing the market reaction to corporate entry and exit from the Domini 400 Social Index, recognized as a CSR benchmark, between 1990 and 2004. The paper highlights two main findings: a significant upward trend in absolute value abnormal returns, irrespective of the type of event (for example, addition or deletion from the index), and a significant negative effect on abnormal returns after exit announcements from the Domini index. The latter effect persists even after controlling for concurring financial distress shocks and stock market seasonality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a model to interpret the 2012 eurozone crisis and the ECB's policy response. In the model, bank lending is distorted by debt overhang, banks hold sovereign bonds, and the government guarantees the bailout of bank creditors. A self-fulfi lling pessimistic view of the economy can trigger a banking and sovereign crisis: with pessimistic economic expectations, the value of sovereign bonds declines, the bank risk of default rises, and the debt overhang distortion worsens; this leads to a contraction in bank lending and to a decline in economic activity, which confi rms the initial pessimistic expectations. A commitment by the central bank to purchase the sovereign bonds at pre-crisis market spreads manages to eliminate the crisis equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a tractable rational bubbles model with financial frictions, downward nominal wage rigidity, and the zero lower bound. The interaction of financial frictions and nominal rigidities leads to a "bubbly pecuniary externality," where competitive speculation in risky bubbly assets can result in excessive investment booms that precede inefficient busts. The collapse of a large bubble can push the economy into a "secular stagnation" equilibrium, where the zero lower bound and the nominal wage rigidity constraint bind, leading to a persistent and inefficient recession. We evaluate a macroprudential leaning-against-the-bubble policy that balances the trade-off between the booms and busts of bubbles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper surveys the recent literature on the fiscal implications of central bank balance sheets, with a special focus on political economy issues. It then presents the results of simulations that describe the effects of different scenarios for the Federal Reserve's longer-run balance sheet on its earnings remittances to the U.S. Treasury and, more broadly, on the government's overall fiscal position. We find that reducing longer-run reserve balances from $2.3 trillion (roughly the current amount) to $1 trillion reduces the likelihood of posting a quarterly net loss in the future from 30 percent to under 5 percent. Further reducing longer-run reserve balances from $1 trillion to pre-crisis levels has little effect on the likelihood of net losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High levels of correlation among financial assets, as well as extreme losses, are typical during crisis periods. In such situations, quantitative asset allocation models are often not robust enough to deal with estimation errors and lead to identifying underperforming investment strategies. It is an open question if in such periods, it would be better to hold diversified portfolios, such as the equally weighted, rather than investing in few selected assets. In this paper, we show that alternative strategies developed by constraining the level of diversification of the portfolio, by means of a regularization constraint on the sparse lq-norm of portfolio weights, can better deal with the trade-off between risk diversification and estimation error. In fact, the proposed approach automatically selects portfolios with a small number of active weights and low risk exposure. Insights on the diversification relationships between the classical minimum variance portfolio, risk budgeting strategies, and diversification-constrained portfolios are also provided. Finally, we show empirically that the diversification-constrained based lq-strategy outperforms state-of-art methods during crises, with remarkable out-of-sample performance in risk minimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two striking facts about international capital flows in emerging economies motivate this paper: (1) Governments hold large amounts of international reserves, for which they obtain a return lower than their borrowing cost. (2) Purchases of domestic assets by nonresidents and purchases of foreign assets by residents are both procyclical and collapse during crises. We propose a dynamic model of endogenous default that can account for these facts. The government faces a trade-off between the benefits of keeping reserves as a buffer against rollover risk and the cost of having larger gross debt positions. Long-duration bonds, the countercyclical default premium, and sudden stops are important for the quantitative success of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we measure the welfare benefit of ongoing stabilization policies? We develop a methodology to calculate the welfare cost of business cycles taking into account that observed consumption is partially smoothed. We propose a decomposition that disentangles consumption in a mix of laissez-faire (absent policies) and riskless components. With a novel identification strategy, we estimate the span of stabilization power. In our preferred specification, we find that the welfare cost of total fluctuations is 11 percent of lifetime consumption, of which 82 percent is smoothed by the status quo policies, yielding a residual 1.8 percent of consumption to be tackled by policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the dominant role of the US dollar, we explore how monetary policy (MP) shocks in the US can affect a small open economy through the expectation channel. We combine data from a panel survey of firms' expectations in Uruguay with granular information about firms' debt position and total imports on a monthly basis. We show that a contractionary MP shock in the US reduces firms' ination and cost expectations in Uruguay. This result contrasts with the inationary effect of this shock on the Uruguayan economy, suggesting uncertainty about the policy regime. We discuss the issues and challenges of this expectation channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how a relatively small amount of heterogeneous securities created turmoil in financial markets in much of the world in 2007 and 2008. The drivers of the financial turmoil and the financial crisis of 2008 were heterogeneous securities that were hard to value. These securities created concerns about counterparty risk and ultimately created substantial uncertainty. The problems spread in ways that were hard to see in advance. The run on prime money market funds in September 2008 and the effects on commercial paper were an important aspect of the crisis itself and are discussed in some detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. This paper first documents the significant role played by the FHLB System at the outset of the ongoing financial crisis and then provides evidence about the uses of these funds by their bank and thrift members. We then identify the trade-offs faced by FHLB member-borrowers when choosing between accessing the FHLB System or the Federal Reserve's discount window during the crisis. We conclude by describing the fragmented U.S. lender-of-last-resort framework and finding that additional clarity about the respective roles of the various liquidity facilities would be helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the question of whether market participants could have or should have anticipated the large increase in foreclosures that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Most of these foreclosures stemmed from loans originated in 2005 and 2006, leading many to suspect that lenders originated a large volume of extremely risky loans during this period. However, the authors show that while loans originated in this period did carry extra risk factors, particularly increased leverage, underwriting standards alone cannot explain the dramatic rise in foreclosures. Focusing on the role of house prices, the authors ask whether market participants underestimated the likelihood of a fall in house prices or the sensitivity of foreclosures to house prices. The authors show that, given available data, market participants should have been able to understand that a significant fall in prices would cause a large increase in foreclosures although loan-level (as opposed to ownership-level) models would have predicted a smaller rise than actually occurred. Examining analyst reports and other contemporary discussions of the mortgage market to see what market participants thought would happen, the authors find that analysts, on the whole, understood that a fall in prices would have disastrous consequences for the market but assigned a low probability to such an outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the negative externalities that may occur when a large bank fails, describes the nature of those externalities, and explores whether they may be greater in a case involving a large cross-border banking organization. The analysis suggests that the chief negative externalities are associated with credit losses and losses due to liquidity problems, and these losses are critically affected by how promptly an insolvent institution is closed, how quickly depositors gain access to their funds, and how long it takes borrowers to reestablish credit relationships. While regulatory delay and forbearance may affect the size and distribution of losses, the likely incident of systemic risk and the negative externalities are more associated with the structure of the applicable bankruptcy laws and methods available to resolve a failed institution and quickly get it operating again. This circumstance implies that regulatory concerns about systemic risk should be directed first at closing institutions promptly, reforming bankruptcy statutes to admit special procedures for handling bank failures, and providing mechanisms to give creditors and borrowers prompt and immediate access to their funds and lines of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the negative externalities that may occur when a large bank fails, describes the nature of those externalities, and explores whether they may be greater in a case involving a large cross-border banking organization. The analysis suggests that the chief negative externalities are associated with credit losses and losses due to liquidity problems, and these losses are critically affected by how promptly an insolvent institution is closed, how quickly depositors gain access to their funds, and how long it takes borrowers to reestablish credit relationships. While regulatory delay and forbearance may affect the size and distribution of losses, the likely incident of systemic risk and the negative externalities are more associated with the structure of the applicable bankruptcy laws and methods available to resolve a failed institution and quickly get it operating again. This circumstance implies that regulatory concerns about systemic risk should be directed first at closing institutions promptly, reforming bankruptcy statutes to admit special procedures for handling bank failures, and providing mechanisms to give creditors and borrowers prompt and immediate access to their funds and lines of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the negative externalities that may occur when a large bank fails, describes the nature of those externalities, and explores whether they may be greater in a case involving a large cross-border banking organization. The analysis suggests that the chief negative externalities are associated with credit losses and losses due to liquidity problems, and these losses are critically affected by how promptly an insolvent institution is closed, how quickly depositors gain access to their funds, and how long it takes borrowers to reestablish credit relationships. While regulatory delay and forbearance may affect the size and distribution of losses, the likely incident of systemic risk and the negative externalities are more associated with the structure of the applicable bankruptcy laws and methods available to resolve a failed institution and quickly get it operating again. This circumstance implies that regulatory concerns about systemic risk should be directed first at closing institutions promptly, reforming bankruptcy statutes to admit special procedures for handling bank failures, and providing mechanisms to give creditors and borrowers prompt and immediate access to their funds and lines of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implications that alternative regulatory structures may have for resolving failed banking institutions. We place our emphasis on the European Union (EU), which is both economically and financially large and has several features relating to cross-border banking in the form of direct investment that may heighten the problems we consider. We propose four principles to ensure the efficient resolution of bank failures, should they occur, with minimum, if any, credit and liquidity losses. These principles include prompt legal closure of institutions before they become economically insolvent, prompt identification of claims and assignment of losses, prompt reopening of failed institutions, and prompt recapitalizing and reprivatization of failed institutions. Finally, we propose a mechanism to put such a scheme into place quickly in the case where a cross-border banking organization seeks to take advantage of the liberal cross-border branching provisions in the single banking license available to banks in the EU. In return for the privilege of such a license, the bank agrees to be subject to a legal closure rule as a positive capital ratio established by the EU or the home country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should public debt be managed when uncertainty about the business cycle is widespread and debt levels are high, as in the aftermath of the last financial crisis? This paper analyzes optimal fiscal policy with ambiguity aversion and endogenous government spending. We show that, without ambiguity, optimal surplus-to-output ratios are acyclical and that there is no rationale for either reduction or further accumulation of public debt. In contrast, ambiguity about the cycle can generate optimal policies that resemble "austerity" measures. Optimal policy prescribes front-loaded fiscal consolidations and convergence to a balanced primary budget in the long run. This is the case when interest rates are sufficiently responsive to cyclical shocks; that is, when the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is sufficiently low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System in the U.S. housing finance system. This cooperatively owned government-sponsored enterprise has changed markedly over the past 25 years as a result of membership liberalization and the demise of thrift institutions. Today, despite its name, size, and principal activities, the FHLB System actually provides little targeted support to the housing sector. Instead, recent research highlights the role of the FHLB System as a provider of subsidized general liquidity to its members, including the very largest commercial banking organizations. This role was especially pronounced during the onset of the recent financial crisis and gave rise to the perception of the FHLB System as having become the "lender of next-to-last-resort." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the sovereign debt crisis of 2012, some southern European countries have debated proposals to leave the Euro. We evaluate this policy change in a standard monetary model with seigniorage financing of the deficit. The main novel feature is that we depart from rational expectations while maintaining full rationality of agents in a sense made very precise. Our first contribution is to show that small departures from rational expectations imply that in ation upon exit can be orders of magnitude higher than under rational expectations. Our second contribution is to provide a framework for policy analysis in models without rational expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matching efficiency is the productivity of the process for matching jobseekers to available jobs. Jobfinding is the output; vacant jobs and active jobseekers are the inputs. Measurement of matching efficiency follows the same principles as measuring a Hicks-neutral index of productivity of production. We develop a framework for measuring matching productivity when the population of jobseekers is heterogeneous. The efficiency index for each type of jobseeker is the monthly jobfinding rate for the type adjusted for the overall tightness of the labor market. We find that overall matching efficiency declined over the period, at just below its earlier downward trend. We develop a new approach to measuring matching rates that avoids counting short-duration jobs as successes. And we show that the outward shift in the Beveridge curve in the post-crisis period is the result of pre-crisis trends, not a downward shift in matching efficiency attributable to the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in subsequent decades have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. The global financial crisis and the recent global pandemic have further reignited this discussion among academics and policymakers. A key question about these policy proposals for debt restructurings that has proved hard to handle is how they inuence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address this challenge by evaluating policy proposals in a quantitative sovereign default model that incorporates two essential features of debt: maturity choice and debt renegotiation in default. We find, first, that a rule that tilts the distribution of creditor losses during restructurings toward holders of long-maturity bonds reduces short-term yield spreads, lowering the probability of a sovereign default by 25 percent. Second, issuing GDP-indexed bonds exclusively during restructurings also reduces the probability of default, especially of defaults in the five years following a debt restructuring. The policies lead to welfare improvements and reductions in haircuts of similar magnitude when implemented separately. When jointly implemented, they reinforce each other's welfare gains, suggesting good complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We search for hysteresis in aggregate post-WWII U.S. data. Defining hysteresis as the presence of aggregate demand shocks with a permanent impact on real GDP, we identify such shocks based on Bayesian VARs via a combination of zero long-run restrictions and both short- and long-run sign restrictions. Our findings suggest that hysteresis effects have been virtually absent for the sample excluding the financial crisis and the Great Recession, and they only appear when including the period following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Even then, these effects only account for at most 10 per cent of the long-run variance of GDP. We show via a DSGE model-based simulation analysis that there is a high probability of detecting hysteresis effects even when the data-generating process features none by construction. We account for this misspecification issue with a Monte Carlo-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Basel capital adequacy ratios lost credibility with financial markets during the crisis. This paper argues that failure was the result of the reliance of the Basel standards on overstated asset values in reported equity capital. The United States' stress tests were able to assist in restoring credibility, in part because they could capture deterioration in asset values. However, whether stress tests will prove equally valuable in the next crisis is not clear. Some of the weaknesses in the Basel ratios are being addressed. Moreover, the U.S. tests' success was the result of a combination of circumstances that may not exist next time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this reply to a comment by Jentsch and Lunsford, we show that, when focusing on the relevant impulse responses, the evidence for economic and statistically significant macroeconomic effects of tax changes in Mertens and Ravn (2013) remains present for a range of asymptotically valid inference methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the relationships between bubbles, capital flows, and economic activities in a rational bubble model with two large open economies. We establish a reinforcing relationship between global imbalances and bubbles. Capital flows from South to North facilitate the emergence and the size of bubbles in the North. Bubbles in the North in turn facilitate South-to-North capital flows. The model can simultaneously explain several stylized features of recent bubble episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 1763, northern Europe experienced a financial crisis with numerous parallels to the 2008 Lehman Brothers episode. The 1763 crisis was sparked by the failure of a major provider of acceptance loans, a form of securitized credit resembling modern asset-backed commercial paper. The central bank at the hub of the crisis, the Bank of Amsterdam, responded by broadening the range of acceptable collateral for its repo transactions. Analysis of archival data shows that this emergency source of liquidity helped to contain the effects of the crisis, by preventing the collapse of at least two other major securitizers. While the underlying themes seem to have changed little in 250 years, the modest scope of the 1763 liquidity intervention, together with the lightly regulated nature of the eighteenth century financial landscape, provide some informative contrasts with events of late 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a tractable dynamic macroeconomic model of self-fulfilling bank runs. A bank is vulnerable to a run when a loss of investors' confidence triggers deposit withdrawals and leads the bank to default on its obligations. We analytically characterize how the vulnerability of an individual bank depends on macroeconomic aggregates and how the number of banks facing a run affects macroeconomic aggregates in turn. In general equilibrium, runs can be partial or complete, depending on aggregate leverage and the dynamics of asset prices. Our normative analysis shows that the effectiveness of credit easing and its welfare implications depend on whether a financial crisis is driven by fundamentals or by self-fulfilling runs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important, yet untested, prediction of many macro models with financial frictions is that financial market disruptions can have highly non-linear effects on economic activity. This paper presents empirical evidence supporting this prediction, and in particular that financial shocks have substantial (i) asymmetric and (ii) state dependent effects. First, negative shocks to credit supply have large and persistent effects on output, but positive shocks have no significant effect. Second, credit supply shocks have larger and more persistent effects in periods of weak economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States Congress created the Federal Reserve System in 1913. The System consists of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D. C.; 12 Federal Reserve Banks; and thousands of member commercial banks. This entry describes the evolution of the System and of monetary policy from its foundation through 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a finite-depositor version of the Diamond-Dybvig model of financial intermediation in which the bank and all depositors observe withdrawals as they occur. We derive the constrained efficient allocation of resources in closed form and show that this allocation provides liquidity insurance to depositors. The contractual arrangement that decentralizes this allocation resembles a standard bank deposit in that it has a demandable debt-like structure. When withdrawals are unusually high, however, depositors who withdraw relatively late experience significant losses. This contractual arrangement can be fragile, admitting another equilibrium in which depositors run on the bank by withdrawing funds regardless of their liquidity needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Reserve System failed to prevent the collapse of intermediation during the Great Depression (1929-1933) and took action as if it was unaware of policies that should have been taken in the event of widespread bank runs. The National Banking Era panics and techniques to alleviate them should have been useful references for how to alleviate a fi nancial crisis. We suggest that the overwhelming effort to fi nance World War I combined with a perspective held by contemporary Federal Reserve offi cials that the central bank legislation was suffi cient to overcome fi nancial crises are key reasons why the historical experiences were overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows that banking organization growth is associated with higher operational losses per dollar of total assets and incidence of tail risks. Event studies using M&A activity and instrumental variable regressions provide consistent evidence. The relationship between banking organization growth and operational risk varies by loss event types and balance sheet categories. We demonstrate that higher growth predicts worse operational risk realizations during the global financial crisis. These findings have implications for bank performance, risk management and supervision in a continually consolidating banking industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudden Stops are financial crises defined by a large, sudden current-account reversal. They occur in both advanced and emerging economies and result in deep recessions, collapsing asset prices, and real exchange-rate depreciations. They are preceded by economic expan- sions, current-account deficits, credit booms, and appreciated asset prices and real exchange rates. Fisherian models (i.e. models with credit constraints linked to market prices) ex- plain these stylized facts as an outcome of Irving Fisher's debt-deation mechanism. On the normative side, these models feature a pecuniary externality that provides a foundation for macroprudential policy (MPP). We review the stylized facts of Sudden Stops, the evi- dence on MPP use and effectiveness, and the findings of the literature on Fisherian models. Quantitatively, Fisherian amplification is strong and optimal MPP reduces sharply the size and frequency of crises, but it is also complex and potentially time-inconsistent, and simple MPP rules are less effective. We also provide a new MPP analysis incorporating investment. Using a constant debt-tax policy, we construct a crisis probability-output frontier showing that there is a tradeoff between financial stability and long-run output (i.e., reducing the probability of crises reduces long-run output). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]