In the historic Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016, U.K. citizens voted in favor of leaving the European Union (EU), a result that created substantial uncertainty regarding the future economic relationship between the United Kingdom and the EU. As can be seen in Figure 1, uncertainty, measured...

Basel's new standardized approach (SA) for operational risk capital may allow for regulatory arbitrage through the use of insurance. Under the SA, banks will have incentive to insure recurring losses, which can meaningfully reduce capital requirements even as it does not meaningfully decrease...

While the large collapse in aggregate international trade volumes during the Great Recession has been widely studied in the literature, the recovery is much less well understood. Indeed, by 2014 U.S. foreign sales were still below their historical post-recession level. In this note, we summarize...

Wealth concentration in the U.S. has increased over the past 25 years across multiple methodologies for measuring wealth. But the reasons for the increase—and the timing of the increase—are quite different. In this note, we show that most available estimates are fairly consistent in level...

The U.S. economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate a rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism in recent decades. We attempt to understand potential common forces behind these empirical regularities through the lens of a micro-founded general...

In this note, we first present trends in participation in employment-related retirement plans, and then provide analysis for one birth cohort, nearing retirement age, of the impact of Social Security on retirement wealth

The share of wealth owned by top wealth-holders in the U.S. has been rising over the past few decades, though there is some debate about exactly how concentrated wealth is, and how fast those top wealth shares are rising

Despite the increasing importance of U.S. CLOs, information on the holders of U.S. CLO securities is very limited. This note provides a breakdown of CLO investors by location and investor type using data from the Treasury International Capital (TIC) system. We find that most U.S. CLOs are held...