which takes the form of a minimum liquidity requirement coupled with monitoring of the quality of liquid assets. We establish the robustness of our insights when the set of bailout instruments is endogenous and characterize the structure of optimal bailouts.

Financial assets provide return and liquidity services to their holders. However, during severe financial crises many asset prices plummet, destroying their liquidity provision function at the worst possible time. In this paper we present a model of fire sales and market breakdowns, and of the...

present. Counterfactuals reveal that consumer surplus can actually increase as the market moves toward monopoly, which suggests policymakers ought to consider the dynamic trade-off of lower current consumer surplus from higher prices for higher future surplus from more innovation. Comparative...

Theories in which firms have heterogeneous productivities, such as those of Melitz (2003) and Chaney (2008), have been successful in capturing this empirical regularity that the average exporting firm is larger than the average nonexporter, but they fail to capture the richness of the...

We show that when the prior that the return is high is below (above) a half, the agent is rewarded for low (high) signals. This is problematic if the agent can hide options, because then he might show only low signals. The possibility of hiding endogenously affects current and future information...

We analyze the impact of lender recourse on mortgage defaults theoretically and empirically across U.S. states. We study the effect of state laws regarding deficiency judgments in a model where lenders can use the threat of a deficiency judgment to deter default or to shorten the default...

New Keynesian model.

One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated quarterly and monthly data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall...

in labor hours.

Arguably the most difficult question in macroeconomics is: why do individuals set prices in nominal terms that do not respond to changes in the aggregate price level? Of course some must respond, or the aggregate does not change, but many prices seem sticky in the short run. In popular macro...