Search results

"Realizing that their traditional instruments were inadequate for responding to the crisis that began on 9 August 2007, Federal Reserve officials improvised. Beginning in mid-December 2007, they implemented a series of changes directed at ensuring that liquidity would be distributed to those institutions that needed it most. Conceptually, this meant America's central bankers shifted from focusing solely on the size of their balance sheet, which they use to keep the overnight interbank lending rate close to their chosen target, to manipulating the composition of their assets as well. In this paper, I examine the Federal Reserve's conventional and unconventional responses to the financial crisis of 2007-2008"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Countries around the world differ substantially in the relative importance of their banks and capital markets in providing investment financing. This paper examines one potential explanation for the cross-country differences in the importance of banks and capital market financing of investment. It is our contention that much of the variation across countries in the depth and breadth of capital markets can be explained by a combination of the existence of deposit insurance and the extent to which a country's banking system is state owned. We provide both an equilibrium model predicting and empirical evidence showing that countries with explicit deposit insurance and a high degree of state-owned bank assets have smaller equity markets, a lower number of publicly traded firms and a smaller amount of bank credit to the private sector. Finally, our results suggest that the effects of deposit guarantees are more important than the origins of national legal systems"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

At the dawn of the 21st century, property and equity ownership are spread more broadly across the population than they once were. One consequence of this is that asset price booms and crashes now have a direct impact on general welfare. The fact that bubbles distort nearly all economic decisions gives policymakers a stronger interest in asset price stability. In this article I examine the theoretical and empirical case for the existence of equity and property bubbles, and then summarise the economic distortions that they create. The evidence suggests increasing our attention to property prices. I go on to discuss the possible policy responses, including examining the consequences of changing the way in which housing is included in standard aggregate price measures.