While both public and private financial agencies supply asset markets with large amounts of information, they do not generally disclose all asset-related information to the general public. This observation leads us to ask what principles might govern the optimal disclosure policy for an asset...

This paper examines a topic of increasing interest, the potential determinants of extensive (i.e., number of firms) and intensive (i.e., average exports per firm) trade margins, using state-level trade to 190 countries. In addition to distance and country size, other factors affecting trade...

In this paper we conduct an empirical investigation of how neighborhood mortgage adoption contagion affects mortgage product choice, with an emphasis on Hispanic borrowers. We use loan-level mortgage data for metropolitan areas in California and Florida during 2004 and 2005, the peak years of...

We investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood- level data on racial and ethnic characteristics...

Characterizing asset price volatility is an important goal for financial economists. The literature has shown that variables that proxy for the information arrival process can help explain and/or forecast volatility. Unfortunately, however, obtaining good measures of volume and/or order flow is...

In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion using information on self-reports of subjective personal well-being from the 2006 Gallup World Poll. We expand the existing literature on the use of happiness data to analyze economic issues by considering the...

Lagos and Wright (2005) demonstrate how the essential properties of a money-search model are preserved in an environment that is rendered highly tractable with the use of quasi-linear preferences. In this paper, I show that this same innovation can be applied to closely related environments used...

This paper introduces a measure of credit score performance that abstracts from the influence of “situational factors.” Using this measure, we study the role and effectiveness of credit scoring that underlied subprime securities during the mortgage boom of 2000-2006. Parametric and...

We study the contraction of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows in the United States during the recent financial crisis and show their unusual non-resiliency, which depends in part on the global nature of the economic recession, but also on the increases in the cost of financing FDI in the...

We compare a uniform voucher regime against the status quo mix of public and private education, focusing on the distribution of welfare gains and losses across house- holds by income. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not sufficiently valuable for the poorer...