Central banks create money to lend during credit crunches, which might lead to inflation. We examine whether the two key functions of central banks—price stability and last-resort lending—conflict. We develop a nominal model of bank runs à la Diamond and Dybvig (1983) in which individuals...

Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We derive novel incidence and optimum formulas for the overall rate of tax progressivity and the top tax rates on total earnings and bonuses, when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms. Optimal taxes account...

We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 Census. We use two identification strategies to estimate the potential...

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which addressed strains in the asset-backed securities market, was an unusual crisis facility because it provided loans to a wide range of nonbank financial institutions. Using new, detailed loan-level data, we study whether institutional...

We compare two approaches to using information about the signs of structural shocks at specific dates within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR): imposing ‘narrative restrictions’ (NR) on the shock signs in an otherwise set-identified SVAR; and casting the information about the shock...

Employees' annual earnings fall by 13% the year their firm files for bankruptcy, and the present value of lost earnings from bankruptcy to six years following bankruptcy is 87% of pre-bankruptcy annual earnings. More worker earnings are lost in thin labor markets and among small firms. Ex ante...

I jointly use daily data on deaths and public transportation ridership in San Francisco in 1918–19 to estimate a model in which agents choose their level of economic activity based on perceived infection risk, modeled as a function of current and lagged infections or deaths. Agents’ choices...

We examine the effect of the Covid pandemic on willingness to work along both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply. Special survey questions in the Job Search Supplement of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) allow us to elicit information about individuals’ desired work...

In this paper, I explore how optimal aggregate dynamics can be shaped by the presence of moral hazard in unemployment insurance. I also analyze the optimal provision of unemployment insurance and the implications for the amount of cross-sectional heterogeneity. The economy that I consider embeds...

Wealth is distributed more unevenly than income, and one contributing factor might be that richer households earn higher portfolio returns. I uncover one channel that causes portfolio returns to be increasing in wealth: Poorer households consistently buy risky assets in booms—when expected...