Although the instruments and transactions most closely associated with the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 were novel, the underlying themes that played out in the crisis were familiar from previous episodes: Competitive dynamics resulted in excessive leverage and risk-taking by large,...

This paper introduces the ``compound confluent hypergeometric'' (CCH) distribution. The CCH unifies and generalizes three recently introduced generalizations of the beta distribution: the Gauss hypergeometric (GH) distribution of Armero and Bayarri (1994), the generalized beta (GB) distribution...

This paper examines the underlying state of the labor market, assuming data in the monthly "Employment Situation" are contaminated by measurement error and other transient noise. To better filter out unobserved noise, the methodology exploits correlations among labor-market series. Household...