This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets...

The authors present a theory of unsecured consumer debt that does not rely on utility costs of default or on enforcement mechanisms that arise in repeated-interaction settings. The theory is based on private information about a person's type and on a person's incentive to signal his type to...

The authors analyze the potential competitive effects of the proposed Basel II capital regulations on U.S. bank credit card lending. They find that bank issuers operating under Basel II will face higher regulatory capital minimums than Basel I banks, with differences due to the way the two...

The authors develop a legal contract enforcement theory of the own versus lease decision. The allocation of ownership rights will minimize enforcement costs when the legal system is inefficient. In particular, when legal enforcement of contracts is costly, there will be a shift from arrangements...

What caused the worldwide collapse in output from 1929 to 1933? Why was the recovery from the trough of 1933 so protracted for the U.S.? How costly was the decline in terms of welfare? Was the decline preventable? These are some of the questions that have motivated economists to study the Great...

This paper examines risk-adjusted performance measures in banking, which are used as a guide for efficient asset allocation, performance evaluation, and capital structure decisions in complex, multidivisional financial institutions. Traditional measures of performance are contrasted with the...

The authors provide evidence that transactions accounts help financial intermediaries monitor borrowers by offering lenders a continuous stream of data on borrowers' account balances. This information is most readily available to commercial banks, but other intermediaries, such as finance...

The volatility of the U.S. economy since the mid-1980s is much lower than it was during the prior 20-year period. The proximate causes of the increased stability and their relative importance remain unsettled, but the sharpness of the volatility decline and its timing has led authors such as...

How have the longer journeys to work faced by Black commuters evolved in the United States over the last four decades? Black commuters spent 50.3 more minutes commuting per week in 1980 than White commuters; this difference declined to 22.4 minutes per week in 2019. Two factors account for the...

Superceded by WP 18-04 In the U.S., creditors often outsource the task of obtaining repayment from defaulting borrowers to third-party debt collection agencies. This paper argues that an important incentive for this is creditors' concerns about their reputations. Using a model along the lines of...