An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

Models based on economic theory have serious problems at forecasting exchange rates better than simple univariate driftless random walk models, especially at short horizons. Multivariate time series models suffer from the same problem. In this paper, we propose to forecast exchange rates with a...

The lengthy half-lives of real exchange rates in the presence of high degree of exchange rate volatility has been considered as one of the most puzzling empirical regularities in international macroeconomics. This paper suggests that the measure of half-life used in the literature might be...

This paper applies a new model of structural breaks developed by Kapetanios and Tzavalis (2004) to investigate if there exist structural changes in the mean reversion parameter of US macroeconomic series. Ignoring such type of breaks may lead to spurious evidence of unit roots in the...

This paper revisits a number of data-rich prediction methods, like factor models, Bayesian ridge regression and forecast combinations, which are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting, and compares these with a lesser known alternative method: partial least squares regression. Under the...

The aim of this paper is to consider multivariate stochastic volatility models for large dimensional datasets. We suggest use of the principal component methodology of Stock and Watson (2002) for the stochastic volatility factor model discussed by Harvey, Ruiz, and Shephard (1994). The method is...

We test the implications of Flannery’s (1986) and Diamond’s (1991) models concerning the effects of risk and asymmetric information in determining debt maturity, and we examine the overall importance of informational asymmetries in debt maturity choices. We employ data from more than 6,000...

U.S. commercial banks are increasingly using credit scoring models to underwrite small business credits. This paper discusses this technology, evaluates the research findings on the effects of this technology on small business credit availability, and links these findings to a number of research...