In this paper, I test the theory that weak economic conditions in a foreign economy cause cyclical dumping, i.e., the temporary sale of products in a trading partner's economy at a price below average total cost. In order to test this theory, the econometrician would like to have the information...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure...

We review the role of the central bank's (CB) balance sheet in a textbook monetary model, and explore what changes if the central bank is allowed to pay interest on its liabilities. When the central bank cannot pay interest, away from the zero lower bound its (real) balance sheet is limited by...

Refinancing a mortgage is often one of the biggest and most important financial decisions that people make. Borrowers need to choose the interest rate differential at which to refinance and, when that differential is reached, they need to take the steps to refinance before rates change again....

Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor against medical shocks. Yet, poorer people tend to live shorter lifespans and incur lower medical expenses before death than richer people. Taking these and other important dimensions of heterogeneity into account, and carefully...

France, Germany, and Sweden have recently linked vehicle taxes to the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rates of passenger vehicles. France has introduced a system of CO2-based purchase taxes and subsidies, whereas Germany and Sweden impose annual circulation (i.e., registration) taxes that are...

This paper estimates the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1-2010:Q4 for five industrialized economies - the United States, European Union, Australia, Canada and South Korea. We find evidence of a strong countercyclical trade policy response in the...

We document two new facts about the market-level response to minimum wage hikes: firm exit and entry both rise. These results pose a puzzle: canonical models of firm dynamics predict that exit rises but that entry falls. We develop a model of firm dynamics based on putty-clay technology and show...

Hedge fund managers differ in ability and investors want to distinguish good ones from bad. Via the design of their investment strategies, better fund managers want to ease this inference problem while worse fund managers want to complicate it. We impose only the minimal restrictions on the...

In the repo market, forward agreements are security-specific (i.e., there are no deliverable substitutes), which makes it an ideal place to measure the value of fluctuations in a security's available supply. In this study, we quantify the scarcity value of Treasury collateral by estimating the...