Can competition work among privately issued fiat currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum? Only sometimes. To show this, we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies. We modify the current workhorse of monetary economics, the Lagos-Wright environment, by including...

We use a matched credit bureau and mortgage data set to identify occupancy fraud in residential mortgage originations, that is, borrowers who misrepresented their occupancy status as owner occupants rather than residential real estate investors. In contrast to previous studies, our data set...

We use the 2012 South Carolina Department of Revenue data breach to study how data breaches and news coverage about them affect consumers' take-up of fraud protections. In this instance, we find that a remarkably large share of consumers who were directly affected by the breach acquired fraud...

An equilibrium model with firm and worker heterogeneity is constructed to analyze labor market and welfare implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The authors' model implies a significant reduction in the uninsured rate from...

This paper investigates the impact of unconventional monetary policy on firm financing constraints. It focuses on the Federal Reserve's maturity extension program (MEP), which was intended to lower longer-term rates and flatten the yield curve by reducing the supply of long-term government debt....

The deep housing market recession from 2008 through 2010 was characterized by a steep rise in the number of foreclosures and lengthening foreclosure timelines. The average length of time from the onset of delinquency through the end of the foreclosure process also expanded significantly,...

We study the implications of internal consumption habit for new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (NKDSGE) models. Bayesian Monte Carlo methods are employed to evaluate NKDSGE model fit. Simulation experiments show that internal consumption habit often improves the ability of...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from non-crisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to...

In this paper, the authors use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. They test the banks' ability to forecast credit bureau ratings, and vice versa, and show that bank ratings are able to predict future credit bureau ratings. This is...