Complex mortgages exhibit deferred amortization and enable households to postpone loan repayment in contrast to fully amortizing traditional mortgages. Unlike the low income population targeted by subprime mortgages, complex mortgages are used by households with high income levels and prime...

Motor vehicle and motor vehicle parts production plants tend to exhibit a strong degree of agglomeration. This paper estimates a spatial model utilizing detailed plant-level data that is pooled across seven countries in Europe. The paper makes several contributions. First, we assemble a set of...

How do parental investments respond to health endowments at birth? Recent studies have combined insights from an earlier theoretical literature on household resource allocation with improved identification strategies to capture causal effects of early life health shocks. We describe empirical...

A few years ago we sat down with Neil Wallace and had two lengthy, free-ranging conversations about his career and, generally speaking, his views on economics. What follows is a distillation of these conversations

U.S. banking regulation has historically prohibited the ability of a bank to open or own a branch located outside of its home state, commonly referred to as interstate branching. Only since the passage of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) in 1994 have banks...

The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. We find US import policy during...

We evaluate the effect of performance-based incentive programs on educational outcomes for community college students from a random assignment experiment at three campuses. Incentive payments over two semesters were tied to meeting two conditions—enrolling at least half time and maintaining a...

We develop a DSGE model in which the policy rate signals the central bank's view about macroeconomic developments to incompletely informed price setters. The model is estimated with likelihood methods on a U.S. data set including the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price...

The Chicago Fed dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used for policy analysis and forecasting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. This article describes its specification and estimation, its dynamic characteristics and how it is used to forecast the US economy. In many...

Covered bonds and mortgage-backed securities both allow mortgages to be financed with duration-matched bonds. Given the problems in the MBS market during the financial crisis, some suggest that CB might be a substitute for MBS. We examine the use of CB and MBS in the U.S. and Europe, finding...