Ali Haider Ismail
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UCLA. My research interests are in monetary economics, macroeconomics, intermediation, and financial markets.
Contact me at: [email protected]
Download Research Statement (coming soon) for a summary of my job market paper and my research agenda.
Working Papers
Welfare Implications of Reserve Regimes
Draft: (coming soon)
We develop a general equilibrium model to quantify the welfare costs of alternative reserve regimes. Banks in our model face stochastic deposit flows requiring settlement through reserves, creating a precautionary demand shaped by frictions in the over-the-counter interbank market. We establish a novel irrelevance theorem, providing conditions under which interbank frictions and reserve quantities have no welfare implications. With frictions, however, banks’ liquidity management materially affects credit provision and welfare. Quantitatively, we find that increasing inflation to 10% while holding the real discount window rate constant generates welfare costs of 0.8% of consumption—comparable to Lucas (2000) despite our model excluding currency. The model reproduces the post-2008 tripling of reserve holdings and predicts that raising the real return on reserves initially reduces output as reserves crowd out productive loans, with this effect reversing only after deposit demand becomes satiated. Our results demonstrate that the welfare implications of returning to scarce reserves depend critically on implementation details.
Friedman-Schwartz vs. Tobin: A Modern Reassessment of the Great Depression
Draft: August 05, 2025
We revisit the Friedman-Schwartz vs. Tobin debate about the Federal Reserve’s role in the Great Depression by using modern econometric and quantitative-modeling tools. We calibrate a general equilibrium model with a banking sector and an interbank market, building off Bianchi and Bigio (2022). Our model offers novel contributions to the literature through its banking-focused approach that interconnects money, credit, and output. This framework allows us to leverage aggregate banking data from the era, including interbank rates, to examine the Federal Reserve’s policy pass-through into the aggregate economy. The model allows us to weigh the relative importance of various shocks affecting banks and the economy during the period. It is well-suited for conducting counterfactual analyses of policies proposed in Friedman and Schwartz’s “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” particularly an expansion of discount window lending, while accounting for the constraints imposed by the gold standard.