We present a micro-founded monetary model of the world economy to study international currency competition. Our model features "unipolar" equilibria, with a single dominant international currency, and "multipolar" equilibria, in which multiple currencies circulate internationally. Long-run...

Quality ratings are useful when they capture important and durable aspects of overall performance. They are less useful (and can be misleading) when they are excessively volatile, particularly if volatility is not the result of facility-specific performance. We study the volatility of the...

Firms often choose with whom to compete and how similar or how different their products should be relative to those of their rivals. This paper investigates this issue in the app economy by studying the determinants of mobile app success. We leverage natural language processing and unsupervised...

This paper argues that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has outlived the economic and technological conditions that justified its creation. The monopolistic telephone and spectrumscarcity environments of 1934 have been replaced by dynamic, intermodal competition across broadband,...

During the COVID-19 pandemic the US federal government appropriated $189.5 billion in emergency aid to school districts. These funds were supplied to help districts replace lost revenues and to mitigate the harmful effects of the pandemic on learning and other measures of district performance....

Managers of actively managed funds do not maintain a constant investment style. Instead, their factor loadings change over time. These changes are especially large following quarters with extreme returns and fund flows and arise from both active portfolio reallocations and passive style drift....

We present a micro-founded monetary model of the world economy to study international currency competition. Our model features "unipolar" equilibria, with a single dominant international currency, and "multipolar" equilibria, in which multiple currencies circulate internationally. Long-run...

When the Social Security retirement Trust Fund is exhausted in 2032, old-age and survivor benefits in total must be cut by 24 percent, according to current projections. This is generally thought to be an across-the-board cut by the Social Security Administration, which would hit the poor...

This paper critically evaluates the Urban Institute's Land Use Reforms and Housing Costs (2024) study, which aims to link zoning reforms to housing supply using machine-learning analysis of newspaper articles. The study identifies 180 "major" land-use reforms across eight U.S. metropolitan areas...

The steep rise in US interest rates that started in 2022 led many observers to anticipate severe difficulties for emerging market economies (EMEs). Unlike after the Volcker disinflation of the early 1980s or the bond market turmoil of 1994, however, most EMEs weathered the Fed's monetary...