This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim (NEJM July 26, 2007) that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known in the economics literature that failure to include contextual effects can lead to spurious inference on social network...

The diagonal GARCH(1,1) model is shown to support identification of the triangular system and is argued as a second moment analog to traditional exclusion restrictions. Estimators for this result include QML and GMM. The GMM estimator contains many (potential weak) moment conditions that can be...

There is a popular belief that the confluence of bank capital rules and fair value accounting helped trigger the recent financial crisis. The claim is that questionable valuations of long term investments based on prices obtained from illiquid markets created a pro-cyclical effect whereby mark...

This paper evaluates the presence of racial disparities in the issuance of consumer credit. Using a unique and proprietary database of credit histories from a major credit bureau, this paper links location-based information on race with individual credit files. After controlling for the...

As Chari et al (2008) point out in a recent paper, aggregate trends are very hard to interpret. They examine four common claims about the impact of financial sector phenomena on the economy and conclude that all four claims are myths. We argue that to evaluate these popular claims, one needs to...

Household debt repayment behavior has been understudied, especially empirically, despite the heightened debate on rising household debt, personal bankruptcy filings, and arrears. In this paper, we use data from the European Community Household Panel to analyze the determinants of household debt...

In this paper we develop information based factors which outperform other popular factors used in the multifactor pricing literature such as the Fama and French size and book-to-market factors. The first factor is based on the age of an asset, measured by the number of months since the asset's...