The purpose of this lecture is to look beyond the complex events that characterize the global financial and economic crisis, identify the basic mechanisms, and infer the policies needed to resolve the current crisis, as well as the policies needed to reduce the probability of similar events in...

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in nondemocratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of...

This paper examines the causes of the run up in house prices between 1998 and 2006 and the subsequent fall. It is argued that two unique factors have been at work: a true quot;bubblequot; in 2nd homes, and a fundamental expansion and now contraction of mortgage credit availability. These...

This paper examines the strong positive correlation that exists between the volume of housing sales and housing prices. We first examine gross housing flows in the US and divide sales into two categories: transactions that involve a change or choice of tenure, as opposed to owner-to-owner churn....

Coordination models have been used in macroeconomics to study a variety of crises phenomena. It is well understood that, in these models, aggregate fluctuations can be purely self-fulfilling. In this paper I highlight that cross-sectional heterogeneity in expectations regarding the endogenous...

This paper examines the impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax on the weighted average marginal tax rates that apply to various components of taxable income. It also considers the impact of several AMT reform proposals on the number of AMT taxpayers, the total revenue collected from the AMT, and...

This paper uses variation in access to a targeted lending program to estimate whether firms are credit constrained. The basic idea is that while both constrained and unconstrained firms may be willing to absorb all the directed credit that they can get (because it may be cheaper than other...

The propagation of macroeconomic shocks through input-output and geographic networks can be a powerful driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. We first exposit that in the presence of Cobb-Douglas production functions and consumer preferences, there is a specific pattern of economic transmission...

We introduce the possibility of direct punishment by specialized enforcers into a model of community enforcement. Specialized enforcers need to be given incentives to carry out costly punishments. Our main result shows that, when the specialized enforcement technology is sufficiently effective,...

With the increasing ease with which information can be shared in social media, the issue of privacy has become central for the functioning of various online platforms. In this paper, we consider how privacy concerns affect individual choices in the context of a network formation game (where...