We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers....

Examining a parsimonious, yet comprehensive, set of recession signals yields three lessons. First, signals from financial markets, leading indicators of activity, and gauges of the macroeconomic environment are each useful at different horizons, with leading indicators and financial signals...

I study the dynamics of default-free bond yields and term premia using a novel equilibrium term structure model with a New-Keynesian core and imperfect information about productivity. The model generates term premia that are on average positive with sizable countercyclical variation that arises...

Does monetary policy influence who becomes a home owner? Home purchases by low- and moderate-income households may be particularly sensitive to mortgage interest rates, as these households’ budgets are tighter and they more frequently come up against binding payment-to-income ratio constraints...

Operational risk is a substantial source of risk for US banks. Improving the performance of operational risk models allows banks’ management to make more informed risk decisions by better matching economic capital and risk appetite, and allows regulators to enhance their understanding of...

A few sufficient statistics can identify the aggregate effects of distortions to firm investment in a class of general equilibrium models that can accommodate rich general equilibrium effects including endogenous firm entry. This result does not depend on the microfoundation of the distortion;...

We estimate monetary policy surprises (sentiment) from the perspective of three different textual sources: direct central bank communication (FOMC statements and press conferences), news articles, and Twitter posts during FOMC announcement days. Textual sentiment across sources is highly...

The initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic fallout likely posed particular financial strain on U.S. households with children, who faced income disruptions from widespread jobs and hours cuts in addition to new childcare and instruction demands. One common expense for...

We study the relationship between volatility and liquidity in the market for on-the-run Treasury securities using a novel framework for quantifying price impact. We show that at times of relatively low volatility, marginal trades that go with the flow of existing trades tend to have a smaller...

We document the importance of a financial sponsor when a borrower violates a covenant, providing creditors the opportunity to enforce debt contracts. We identify private-equity (PE) sponsored borrowers in the Shared National Credit Program (SNC) data and find PE-sponsored borrowers violate...