This article is a reexamination of the clearing and settlement process in financial markets (particularly the futures market) and its performance during the 1987 stock market crash. It provides both some institutional background and some conceptual perspective on the problems faced by the system during the week of October 19. Much of the discussion is based on the useful analogies that can be drawn between the clearinghouse and other financial intermediaries, such as banks and insurance companies. A major conclusion is that the Federal Reserve played a vital role in protecting the integrity of the clearing and settlements system during the crash.

Several recent papers have tested the permanent income-cum-rational expectations hypothesis using data on nondurable or semidurable consumption. We show how this approach can be extended to the case of durables. An application to panel data on automobile expenditures reveals no evidence against the permanent income hypothesis. This result is unchanged in subsamples segregated by family holdings of liquid assets.

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 econometrician, maximum likelihood estimates of their relative importance in the determination of productivity change are obtained.

Credit markets, including the market for bank loans, are characterized by imperfect and asymmetric information. These informational frictions can interact with other economic forces to produce periods of credit-market stress, in which intermediation is unusually costly and households and businesses have difficulty obtaining credit. A high level of credit-market stress, as in a severe financial crisis, may in turn produce a deep and prolonged recession. I present evidence that financial distress and disrupted credit markets were important sources of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Changes in the state of credit markets also play a role in “ garden-variety” business cycles and in the transmission of monetary policy to the economy. (JEL D82, E32, E44, E52, G21, N22)

General Nature of the Editorial Process

Financial stability is an important goal of policy, but the relation of financial stability to economic performance and even the meaning of the term itself are poorly understood. This paper explores these issues in a theoretical model. We argue that financial instability, or fragility, occurs when entrepreneurs who want to undertake investment projects have low net worth; the heavy reliance on external finance that this implies causes the agency costs of investment to be high. High agency costs in turn lead to low and inefficient investment. Standard policies for fighting financial fragility can be interpreted as transfers that maintain or increase the net worth of potential borrowers.