Consumers purchase energy in many forms. Sometimes energy goods are consumed directly, for instance, in the form of gasoline used to operate a vehicle, electricity to light a home or natural gas to heat a home. At other times, the cost of energy is embodied in the prices of goods and services...

We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Minority borrowers are less likely to...

The U.S. stock ownership rate doubled between 1983 and 2001 but remains below predictions of some equity participation models. Consistent with calibration studies by Heaton and Lucas (2000) and Gomes and Michaelides (2005), mutual fund costs and indicators of background labor risk are...

We provide evidence on the dynamic effects of fuel price shocks, shipping demand shocks and shipping supply shocks on real dry bulk freight rates in the long run. We first analyze a new and large dataset on dry bulk freight rates for the period from 1850 to 2020, finding that they followed a...

For over two centuries, the municipal bond market has been a source of systemic risk, which returned early in the COVID-19 downturn when borrowing from securities markets became costly for many private and public entities, and some found it difficult to borrow at all. Indeed, just before the Fed...

Cities are shaped by the strength of agglomeration and dispersion forces. We show that the COVID-19 pandemic has re-introduced disease transmission as a dispersion force in modern cities. We use detailed housing data to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the location demand for...

This paper uses a battery of calibrated and estimated structural models to determine the causal drivers of the negative correlation between output and aggregate uncertainty. We find the transmission of uncertainty shocks to output is weak, while aggregate uncertainty endogenously responds to...

This paper studies the transmission of the major shocks in the U.S. housing market in the 2000s to consumption and residential investment. Using geographically disaggregated data, I show that residential investment is more responsive to these shocks than consumption, as measured by elasticities...

Based on novel survey data, we document the evolution of commuting behavior in the U.S. over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Work from home (WFH) increased sharply and persistently after the outbreak, and much more so among some workers than others. Using theory and evidence, we argue that...

In a series of recent studies, Raffaella Giacomini and Toru Kitagawa have developed an innovative new methodological approach to estimating sign-identified structural VAR models that seeks to build a bridge between Bayesian and frequentist approaches in the literature. Their latest paper with...