Mortgage loss-given-default (LGD) increased significantly when house prices plummeted during the financial crisis, but it has remained over 40 percent in recent years, despite a strong housing recovery. Our results indicate that the sustained high LGDs post-crisis is due to a combination of an...

Regulators express growing concern over predatory loans, which the authors take to mean loans that borrowers should decline. Using a model of consumer credit in which such lending is possible, they identify the circumstances in which it arises both with and without competition. The authors find...

The authors propose a theory of firm dynamics in which workers have ideas for new projects that can be sold in a market to existing firms or implemented in new firms: spin-offs. Workers have private information about the quality of their ideas. Because of an adverse selection problem, workers...

This study documents a general decline in the volatility of employment growth during the period 1956 to 2005 and examines its possible sources. Estimates from a state-level pooled cross-section/time-series model indicate that aggregate and state-level factors each account for an important share...

The author uses intuition derived from several of his research papers to make three points. First, in the absence of a common law balancing test, application of uniform patentability criteria favors some industries over others. Policymakers must decide the optimal tradeoff across industries....

This paper generalizes and extends the labor market search and matching model of Berliant, Reed, and Wang (2006). In this model, the density of cities is determined endogenously, but the matching process becomes more efficient as density increases. As a result, workers become more selective in...

Is it possible to forecast using poorly measured data? According to the permanent income hypothesis, a low personal saving rate should predict rising future income (Campbell, 1987). However, the U.S. personal saving rate is initially poorly measured and has been repeatedly revised upward in...

In economics, common factors are often assumed to underlie the co-movements of a set of macroeconomic variables. For this reason, many authors have used estimated factors in the construction of prediction models. In this paper, we begin by surveying the extant literature on diffusion indexes. We...

The authors establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for local real determinacy in a discrete-time production economy with monopolistic competition and a quadratic price adjustment cost under forward-looking policy rules, for the case where capital is in exogenously fixed supply and the...

Overconfidence is a widely documented phenomenon. Empirical evidence reveal two types of overconfidence in financial markets: investors both overestimate the average rate of return to their assets and underestimate uncertainty associated with the return. This paper explores implications of...