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Journal Article
Monetary explanations of the Great Depression: a selective survey of empirical evidence
Seventy years after the Great Depression, economists still debate the causes of this economic catastrophe. Two leading explanations are distinguished by whether or not the Federal Reserve?s monetary policies are perceived as being chiefly responsible for propagating and magnifying the initial contraction into a depression. ; This article surveys recent modeling efforts and empirical work that examine aggregate explanations for the Great Depression from both the extensive literature using vector autoregression techniques and the more recent literature using dynamic stochastic general ...
Working Paper
Too-Big-to-Fail before the Fed
?Too-big-to-fail? is consistent with policies followed by private bank clearing houses during financial crises in the U.S. National Banking Era prior to the existence of the Federal Reserve System. Private bank clearing houses provided emergency lending to member banks during financial crises. This behavior strongly suggests that ?too-big-to-fail? is not the problem causing modern crises. Rather, it is a reasonable response to the threat posed to large banks by the vulnerability of short-term debt to runs.
Working Paper
The Panic of 1907
This paper summarizes the academic literature on the Panic of 1907 in the United States. Despite over 100 years of separation, research by financial economic historians continues to uncover important data and underexploited connections between institutions to improve present day understanding of a watershed economic event?one that preceded the successful movement to establish a central bank in the United States in 1913.
Working Paper
The Federal Reserve System and World War I: Designing Policies without Precedent
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 financial crisis. We suggest that the overwhelming effort to finance World War I combined with a perspective held by contemporary Federal Reserve officials that the central bank legislation was sufficient to overcome financial crises are key ...
Working Paper
Combining Survey Long-Run Forecasts and Nowcasts with BVAR Forecasts Using Relative Entropy
This paper constructs hybrid forecasts that combine both short- and long-term conditioning information from external surveys with forecasts from a standard fixed-coefficient vector autoregression (VAR) model. Specifically, we use relative entropy to tilt one-step ahead and long-horizon VAR forecasts to match the nowcast and long-horizon forecast from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. The results indicate meaningful gains in multi-horizon forecast accuracy relative to model forecasts that do not incorporate long-term survey conditions. The accuracy gains are achieved for a range of ...
Working Paper
Liquidity creation without a lender of last resort: clearinghouse loan certificates in the Banking Panic of 1907
We employ a new data set comprised of disaggregate figures on clearinghouse loan certificate issues in New York City to document how the dominant national banks were crucial providers of temporary liquidity during the Panic of 1907. Clearinghouse loan certificates were essentially "bridge loans" arranged between clearinghouse members that enabled and were issued in anticipation of monetary gold imports, which took a few weeks to arrive. The large New York City national banks acted as private liquidity providers by requesting (and the New York clearinghouse issuing) a volume of clearinghouse ...