The standard source for pre-WWII global freight rate trends is the Isserlis British tramp shipping index. We think it is flawed, and that its sources offer vastly more information than the Isserlis aggregate contains. The new data confirm the precipitous decline in nominal freight rates before...

Developing countries pay substantially higher transportation costs than developed nations, which leads to less trade and perhaps lower incomes. This paper investigates price discrimination in the shipping industry and the role it plays in determining transportation costs. In the presence of...

We study the returns to owning dry bulk cargo ships. Ship earnings exhibit a high degree of mean reversion, driven by industry participants' competitive investment responses to shifts in demand. Ship prices are far too volatile given the mean reversion in earnings. We show that high current ship...

A Markov-switching model is fit for eighteen exchange rates at quarterly and monthly frequencies. This model fits well in-sample at the quarterly frequency for many exchange rates. By the mean-squared-error or mean-absolute-error criterion. the Markov model does not generate superior forecasts...

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...

This article demonstrates the value of microdata for understanding the effect of wages on life cycle fertility dynamics. Conventional estimates of neoclassical economic fertility models obtained from linear aggregate time series regressions are widely criticized for being nonrobust when adjusted...

This paper constructs high-frequency and timely income distributions for the United States. We develop a methodology to combine the information contained in high-frequency public data sources—including monthly household and employment surveys, quarterly censuses of employment and wages, and...

This paper studies how the monetary policy regime affects the relative importance of nominal exchange rates and inflation rates in shaping the response of real exchange rates to shocks. We document two facts about inflation-targeting countries. First, the current real exchange rate predicts...

We provide a first evaluation of the quality of banking stress tests in the European Union. We use stress tests scenarios and banks' estimated losses to recover bank level exposures to macroeconomic factors. Once macro outcomes are realized, we predict banks' losses and compare them to actual...

Even though commodity pricing models have been successful in fitting the term structure of futures prices and its dynamics, they do not generate accurate true distributions of spot prices. This paper develops a new approach to calibrate these models using not only observations of oil futures...