Ben Bernanke
Biographic Data
| ID | 3450147 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Bernanke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernanke |
| SIGNATURE | BEN BERNANKE |
| AFFILIATIONS | Federal Reserve |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 103 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Credit, Debt-Deflation, and the Great Depression Revisited
This article revisits the thesis of Bernanke (1983) that the disruption of private credit markets induced by deflation and falling nominal incomes helps to explain the depth and persistence of the Great Depression. This new look is motivated by economists’ increased attention to the role of financial frictions in economic fluctuations as well as recent empirical research on the Depression and other episodes of disrupted credit. Overall, considera…
Risk Appetite and the Risk-Taking Channel of Monetary Policy
Monetary policy affects financial markets and the broader economy in part by changing the risk appetite of investors. This article provides new evidence for this so-called risk-taking channel of monetary policy by revisiting and extending event-study analysis of Federal Open Market Committee announcements. We document significant effects of unexpected monetary policy changes on risk indicators drawn from equity, fixed-income, credit, and foreign …
A Century of US Central Banking
Several key episodes in the 100-year history of the Federal Reserve have been referred to in various contexts with the adjective “Great” attached to them: the Great Experiment of the Federal Reserve's founding, the Great Depression, the Great Inflation and subsequent disinflation, the Great Moderation, and the recent Great Recession. Here, I'll use this sequence of “Great” episodes to discuss the evolution over the past 100 years of three key asp…
Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound
The success over the years in reducing inflation and, consequently, the average level of nominal interest rates has increased the likelihood that the nominal policy interest rate may become constrained by the zero lower bound. When that happens, a central bank can no longer stimulate aggregate demand by further interest-rate reductions and must rely on non-standard policy alternatives. To assess the potential effectiveness of such policies, we an…
Downside Danger
Monetary Policy and Asset Price Volatility
We explore the implications of asset price volatility for the management of monetary policy.We show that it is desirable for central banks to focus on underlying inflationary pressures.Asset prices become relevant only to the extent they may signal potential inflationary or deflationary forces.Rules that directly target asset prices appear to have undesirable side effects.We base our
Missing the Mark
James K. Galbraith takes our book, Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the In ternational Experience, as the jumping-off point for a screed against obsession with price stability (The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts, January/ February 1999). He does Foreign Affairs readers a disservice by misrepresenting our argument and, as a result, leaves them uninformed about perhaps the most important current debate on the conduct of monet…
The Inflation Obsession
Inflation Targeting
In recent years, a number of industrialized countries have adopted a strategy for monetary policy known as 'inflation targeting.' The authors describe how this approach has been implemented in practice and argue that it is best understood as a broad framework for policy, which allows the central bank 'constrained discretion,' rather than as an ironclad policy rule in the Friedman sense. They discuss the potential of the inflation-targeting approa…
The Financial Accelerator and the Flight to Quality
Adverse shocks to the economy may be amplified by worsening credit-market conditions-- the financial 'accelerator'. Theoretically, we interpret the financial accelerator as resulting from endogenous changes over the business cycle in the agency costs of lending. An implication of the theory is that, at the onset of a recession, borrowers facing high agency costs should receive a relatively lower share of credit extended (the flight to quality) an…
Inside the Black Box
The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight-money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and external funds--enhances the effects of monetary policy on the real economy. The authors document the responses of GDP and its components to monetary policy shocks and describe how the credit channel he…
Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle
We study the phenomenon of short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL) in a sample of 10 interwar U.S. manufacturing industries. Our main findings are that SRIRL was common in the interwar period and that the pattern of SRIRL across industries was similar to that observed in the postwar period. We argue that, since presumably the Depression was not caused by technical regress, these findings are inconsistent with the claim of real business cycl…
Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle
Each of the main explanations of procyclical labor productivity, or short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL), is closely associated with a competing theory of the business cycle: Real business cycle theorists attribute SRIRL to procyclical technological shocks, proponents of recent theories based on non-convexities believe that SRIRL reflects true increasing returns, and Keynesians favor a labor hoarding explanation. Thus evidence on the sou…
The Great Depression, 1929-1938
Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Cyclical Investment
The optimal timing of real investment is studied under the assumptions that investment is irreversible and that new information about returns is arriving over time. Investment should be undertaken in this case only when the costs of deferring the project exceed the expected value of inforrnation gained by waiting. Uncertainty, because it increases the value of waiting for new information, retards the current rate of investment. The nature of inve…
On the Sources of Labor Productivity Variation in U.S. Manufacturing, 1947-1980
Because it concentrates on the co-movements of jointly determined endogenous variables, the traditional analysts of labor productivity does not directly address the question of the causes of productivity change.This problem is solved by a modelling approach in which productivity and other choice variables are assumed to respond optimally to five broad classes of exogenous (causal) shocks.Although these shocks are unobservable to the econometricia…
Factors in Business Investment . Robert Eisner
Essays in Monetary Economics
Essays in Monetary Economics Get access Essays in Monetary Economics. By Harry G. Johnson. 2nd ed. with new Introduction. London: Allen & Unwin. 1969. 332 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Unwin University Books, 52.) 25s. International Affairs, Volume 46, Issue 4, October 1970, Page 780, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/46.4.780b Published: 01 October 1970
Inside the Black Box
The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight-money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and external funds--enhances the effects of monetary policy on the real economy. The authors document the responses of GDP and its components to monetary policy shocks and describe how the credit channel he…
Inflation Targeting
In recent years, a number of industrialized countries have adopted a strategy for monetary policy known as 'inflation targeting.' The authors describe how this approach has been implemented in practice and argue that it is best understood as a broad framework for policy, which allows the central bank 'constrained discretion,' rather than as an ironclad policy rule in the Friedman sense. They discuss the potential of the inflation-targeting approa…
Monetary Policy and Asset Price Volatility
We explore the implications of asset price volatility for the management of monetary policy.We show that it is desirable for central banks to focus on underlying inflationary pressures.Asset prices become relevant only to the extent they may signal potential inflationary or deflationary forces.Rules that directly target asset prices appear to have undesirable side effects.We base our
Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound
The success over the years in reducing inflation and, consequently, the average level of nominal interest rates has increased the likelihood that the nominal policy interest rate may become constrained by the zero lower bound. When that happens, a central bank can no longer stimulate aggregate demand by further interest-rate reductions and must rely on non-standard policy alternatives. To assess the potential effectiveness of such policies, we an…
Downside Danger
Missing the Mark
James K. Galbraith takes our book, Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the In ternational Experience, as the jumping-off point for a screed against obsession with price stability (The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts, January/ February 1999). He does Foreign Affairs readers a disservice by misrepresenting our argument and, as a result, leaves them uninformed about perhaps the most important current debate on the conduct of monet…
Essays in Monetary Economics
Essays in Monetary Economics Get access Essays in Monetary Economics. By Harry G. Johnson. 2nd ed. with new Introduction. London: Allen & Unwin. 1969. 332 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Unwin University Books, 52.) 25s. International Affairs, Volume 46, Issue 4, October 1970, Page 780, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/46.4.780b Published: 01 October 1970
Risk Appetite and the Risk-Taking Channel of Monetary Policy
Monetary policy affects financial markets and the broader economy in part by changing the risk appetite of investors. This article provides new evidence for this so-called risk-taking channel of monetary policy by revisiting and extending event-study analysis of Federal Open Market Committee announcements. We document significant effects of unexpected monetary policy changes on risk indicators drawn from equity, fixed-income, credit, and foreign …
The Inflation Obsession
Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle
We study the phenomenon of short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL) in a sample of 10 interwar U.S. manufacturing industries. Our main findings are that SRIRL was common in the interwar period and that the pattern of SRIRL across industries was similar to that observed in the postwar period. We argue that, since presumably the Depression was not caused by technical regress, these findings are inconsistent with the claim of real business cycl…
Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle
Each of the main explanations of procyclical labor productivity, or short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL), is closely associated with a competing theory of the business cycle: Real business cycle theorists attribute SRIRL to procyclical technological shocks, proponents of recent theories based on non-convexities believe that SRIRL reflects true increasing returns, and Keynesians favor a labor hoarding explanation. Thus evidence on the sou…
The Great Depression, 1929-1938
Essays in Monetary Economics
Essays in Monetary Economics Get access Essays in Monetary Economics. By Harry G. Johnson. 2nd ed. with new Introduction. London: Allen & Unwin. 1969. 332 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Unwin University Books, 52.) 25s. International Affairs, Volume 46, Issue 4, October 1970, Page 780, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/46.4.780b Published: 01 October 1970
Factors in Business Investment . Robert Eisner
Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Cyclical Investment
The optimal timing of real investment is studied under the assumptions that investment is irreversible and that new information about returns is arriving over time. Investment should be undertaken in this case only when the costs of deferring the project exceed the expected value of inforrnation gained by waiting. Uncertainty, because it increases the value of waiting for new information, retards the current rate of investment. The nature of inve…
On the Sources of Labor Productivity Variation in U.S. Manufacturing, 1947-1980
Because it concentrates on the co-movements of jointly determined endogenous variables, the traditional analysts of labor productivity does not directly address the question of the causes of productivity change.This problem is solved by a modelling approach in which productivity and other choice variables are assumed to respond optimally to five broad classes of exogenous (causal) shocks.Although these shocks are unobservable to the econometricia…
The Great Depression, 1929-1938
Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle
Each of the main explanations of procyclical labor productivity, or short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL), is closely associated with a competing theory of the business cycle: Real business cycle theorists attribute SRIRL to procyclical technological shocks, proponents of recent theories based on non-convexities believe that SRIRL reflects true increasing returns, and Keynesians favor a labor hoarding explanation. Thus evidence on the sou…
Procyclical Labor Productivity and Competing Theories of the Business Cycle
We study the phenomenon of short-run increasing returns to labor (SRIRL) in a sample of 10 interwar U.S. manufacturing industries. Our main findings are that SRIRL was common in the interwar period and that the pattern of SRIRL across industries was similar to that observed in the postwar period. We argue that, since presumably the Depression was not caused by technical regress, these findings are inconsistent with the claim of real business cycl…
Inside the Black Box
The 'credit channel' theory of monetary policy transmission holds that informational frictions in credit markets worsen during tight-money periods. The resulting increase in the external finance premium--the difference in cost between internal and external funds--enhances the effects of monetary policy on the real economy. The authors document the responses of GDP and its components to monetary policy shocks and describe how the credit channel he…
The Financial Accelerator and the Flight to Quality
Adverse shocks to the economy may be amplified by worsening credit-market conditions-- the financial 'accelerator'. Theoretically, we interpret the financial accelerator as resulting from endogenous changes over the business cycle in the agency costs of lending. An implication of the theory is that, at the onset of a recession, borrowers facing high agency costs should receive a relatively lower share of credit extended (the flight to quality) an…
Inflation Targeting
In recent years, a number of industrialized countries have adopted a strategy for monetary policy known as 'inflation targeting.' The authors describe how this approach has been implemented in practice and argue that it is best understood as a broad framework for policy, which allows the central bank 'constrained discretion,' rather than as an ironclad policy rule in the Friedman sense. They discuss the potential of the inflation-targeting approa…
Missing the Mark
James K. Galbraith takes our book, Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the In ternational Experience, as the jumping-off point for a screed against obsession with price stability (The Inflation Obsession: Flying in the Face of the Facts, January/ February 1999). He does Foreign Affairs readers a disservice by misrepresenting our argument and, as a result, leaves them uninformed about perhaps the most important current debate on the conduct of monet…
The Inflation Obsession
Monetary Policy and Asset Price Volatility
We explore the implications of asset price volatility for the management of monetary policy.We show that it is desirable for central banks to focus on underlying inflationary pressures.Asset prices become relevant only to the extent they may signal potential inflationary or deflationary forces.Rules that directly target asset prices appear to have undesirable side effects.We base our
Downside Danger
Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound
The success over the years in reducing inflation and, consequently, the average level of nominal interest rates has increased the likelihood that the nominal policy interest rate may become constrained by the zero lower bound. When that happens, a central bank can no longer stimulate aggregate demand by further interest-rate reductions and must rely on non-standard policy alternatives. To assess the potential effectiveness of such policies, we an…
A Century of US Central Banking
Several key episodes in the 100-year history of the Federal Reserve have been referred to in various contexts with the adjective “Great” attached to them: the Great Experiment of the Federal Reserve's founding, the Great Depression, the Great Inflation and subsequent disinflation, the Great Moderation, and the recent Great Recession. Here, I'll use this sequence of “Great” episodes to discuss the evolution over the past 100 years of three key asp…
Risk Appetite and the Risk-Taking Channel of Monetary Policy
Monetary policy affects financial markets and the broader economy in part by changing the risk appetite of investors. This article provides new evidence for this so-called risk-taking channel of monetary policy by revisiting and extending event-study analysis of Federal Open Market Committee announcements. We document significant effects of unexpected monetary policy changes on risk indicators drawn from equity, fixed-income, credit, and foreign …
Credit, Debt-Deflation, and the Great Depression Revisited
This article revisits the thesis of Bernanke (1983) that the disruption of private credit markets induced by deflation and falling nominal incomes helps to explain the depth and persistence of the Great Depression. This new look is motivated by economists’ increased attention to the role of financial frictions in economic fluctuations as well as recent empirical research on the Depression and other episodes of disrupted credit. Overall, considera…
Economics (14 works) · Monetary Policy and Economic Impact (8 works) · Global Financial Crisis and Policies (7 works) · Keynesian economics (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Macroeconomics (6 works) · Monetary economics (6 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (4 works) · Finance (4 works)