In the last decade of the 20th century, the U.S. economy witnessed a persistent and substantial increase in private investment. The boom was sharply reversed in 2001, and a great deal of evidence suggests that the capital stock had become excessive. Standard equilibrium business cycle models...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

Large value payment and securities settlement systems are important components of an economy's financial system. Many such systems are operated by central banks and are liquidity intensive. Central banks often provide inexpensive liquidity to facilitate settlement. This leads to a number of...

This paper extends the jump detection method based on bipower variation to identify realized jumps on financial markets and to estimate parametrically the jump intensity, mean, and variance. Finite sample evidence suggests that the jump parameters can be accurately estimated and that the...

We test the widely held assumption that longer restructurings are more costly. In contrast to earlier studies, we use instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of restructuring time and creditor return. Instrumenting proves critical to our finding that creditor recovery rates...

Utilizing a comprehensive database of transactions in municipal bonds, we investigate the volume-volatility relationship in the muni market. We find a positive relationship between the number of transactions and a bond's price volatility. In contrast to previous studies, we find a negative...

In this paper, we decompose aggregate labor productivity growth in order to gauge the relative importance of multinational corporations (MNCs) to the economic performance of the United States in the 1990s. As we define it, the MNC sector refers to the U.S. activities of multinational...

In perturbation analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems, the presence of a bifurcation implies that the first-order behavior of the economy cannot be characterized solely in terms of the first-order derivatives of the model equations. In this paper, we use two simple examples to illustrate how to...

This paper presents a monetary DSGE model of the U.S. economy. The model captures the most important production, expenditure, and nominal-contracting decisions underlying economic data while remaining sufficiently small to allow it to provide a clear interpretation of the data. We emphasize the...

This work estimates Markov switching models on real time data and shows that the growth rate of gross domestic income (GDI), deflated by the GDP deflator, has done a better job recognizing the start of recessions than has the growth rate of real GDP. This result suggests that placing an...