On a levelized-cost basis, solar and wind power generation are now competitive with fossil fuels. But supply of these renewable resources is variable and intermittent, unlike traditional power plants. As a result, the cost of using flat retail pricing instead of dynamic, marginal-cost...

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other data set in the U.S. Its record of research is truly seminal. In this paper we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the...

The possible existence of trends in volatility in the U.S. labor market has been an important issue in both labor economics and macroeconomics. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has been the workhorse data set used to estimate trends in earnings volatility at the individual level....

One strand of the literature in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the U.S. over the last several decades. There are disagreements in the empirical literature on this question, with some suggestions...

Previous research showed that the dividend price ratio process changed remarkably during the 1980's and 1990's, but that the total payout ratio (dividends plus repurchases over price) changed very little. We investigate implications of this difference for asset pricing models. In particular, the...

Corn prices increased sharply in the summer of 2012 due to expected production shortfalls in the United States, which produces roughly 40% of the world's corn. A heat wave in July adversely affected corn production. We extend earlier statistical models of county-level corn yields in the Eastern...

Extreme heat is the single best predictor of corn and soybean yields in the United States. While average yields have risen continuously since World War II, we find no evidence that relative tolerance to extreme heat has improved between 1950 and 2005. Climate change forecasts project a sharp...

We present a new framework to identify demand and supply elasticities of agricultural commodities using yield shocks - deviations from a time trend of output per area, which are predominantly caused by weather fluctuations. Demand is identified using current-period shocks that give rise to...

The United States produces 41% of the world's corn and 38% of the world's soybeans, so any impact on US crop yields will have implications for world food supply. We pair a panel of county-level crop yields in the US with a fine-scale weather data set that incorporates the whole distribution of...

We study the performance of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) to understand the market imperfections giving rise to these vehicles and their corresponding economic costs. CLO equity tranches earn positive abnormal returns from the risk-adjusted price differential between leveraged loans and...