This paper explores the history of inflation-indexed bond markets in the US and the UK. It documents a massive decline in long-term real interest rates from the 1990's until 2008, followed by a sudden spike in these rates during the financial crisis of 2008. Breakeven inflation rates, calculated...

It is the 100th anniversary of Irving Fisher’s 1911 book The Purchasing Power of Money. But, more important than that, it is a good time, during the current financial turmoil, to reconsider some of his theories again, in light of current events. And I think that some of his theories about...

This address considers the epidemiology of narratives relevant to economic fluctuations. The human brain has always been highly tuned towards narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing. Stories motivate and connect activities...

Concerns that technological progress degrades job opportunities have been expressed over much of the last two centuries by both professional economists and the general public. These concerns can be seen in narratives both in scholarly publications and in the news media. Part of the expressed...

We re-examine the link between changes in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We extend a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the seventeen-year period, 1982 through 1999, to the thirty-one year period, 1978 through 2009. Using techniques reported previously, we...

Questionnaire surveys we have undertaken in 1988 and annually 2003-2012 of recent homebuyers in each of four U.S. cities shed light on their expectations and reasons for buying and selling during the recent housing boom and subsequent collapse, and on the reasons for the housing crisis that...

After the financial crisis that began in 2007 many have expressed renewed doubts about the basic goodness of the financial sectors, doubts related to deeply-held moral principles and traditions of larger society. We need to reconcile these doubts with financial practice. We must acknowledge the...

We construct a price, dividend, and earnings series for the Industrials sector, the Utilities sector, and the Railroads sector from the beginning of the 1870s until the beginning of the year 2013 from primary sources. To infer about mispricings in the sector markets over more than a century, we...

We make the case for the U.S. government to issue a new security with a coupon tied to the United States' current dollar GDP. This security might pay, for example, a coupon of one-trillionth of the GDP, and we propose the name 'Trill' be used to refer to this new security. This new debt...

This paper models Continuous Workout Mortgages (CWMs) in an economic environment with refinancings and prepayments by employing a market-observable variable such as the house price index of the pertaining locality. Our main results include: (a) explicit modelling of repayment and interest-only...