A key feature of the 2007-2008 financial crisis is that for some classes of securities trade has ceased. And where trade does occur, it appears that market prices are well below what one might believe to be the intrinsic value for that class of security. This seems to be especially true for...

A key feature of the 2007 financial crisis is that for some classes of securities trade has practically ceased. And where trade has occurred, it appears that market prices are well below their intrinsic values. This seems especially true for those securities where the payoff streams are...

The financial turmoil which began in August 2007 originated, in part, because investors reassessed the quality of the assets underlying many asset-backed securities (ABS), particularly U.S. mortgages. The prominence of European banks in the early stages of the turmoil created the perception that...

We focus on capturing the increasingly important role that emerging economies play in determining U.S. import prices. Emerging market producers differ from others in two respects: (1) their cost structure is well below that of developed-market producers, and (2) their wide profit margins induce...

This paper examines the structure of international relative price levels using purchasing power parities (PPP) at the product-level from the 2005 World Bank’s International Comparison Program (ICP). Our examination is motivated by questions arising from two applications using economy-wide...

In this paper we construct a new measure of U.S. prices relative to those of its trading partners and use it to reexamine the behavior of U.S. net exports. Our measure differs from existing measures of the dollar's real effective exchange rate (REER) in that it explicitly incorporates both the...

Although computers are universal in the classroom, nearly twenty million children in the United States do not have computers in their homes. Surprisingly, only a few previous studies explore the role of home computers in the educational process. Home computers might be very useful for completing...

This paper estimates the parameters of a stylized dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods, paying special attention to the issue of weak parameter identification. Given the model and the available data, the posterior estimates of the weakly...

Credit gaps are good predictors for financial crises, and banking regulators recommend using them to inform countercyclical capital buffers for banks. Researchers typically create credit gap measures using trend-cycle decomposition methods, which require many modelling choices, such as the...

Central banks have long used dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, which are typically estimated using Bayesian techniques, to inform key policy decisions. This paper offers an empirical strategy that quantifies the information content of the data relative to that of the prior...