This month's newsletter covers the topic of subprime mortgage lending, with data and explanations you may find useful. The subprime market has been a closely covered news topic of late.

This paper offers a plausible explanation for the close link between oil prices and aggregate macroeconomic performance in the 1970s. Although this link has been well documented in the empirical literature, standard economic models are not able to replicate this link when actual oil prices are...

Labor productivity comoves strongly with output, leads output and employment, and is only weakly correlated with employment. Procyclical productivity is observed in virtually all countries and industries, and it is observed even in periods of fluctuations due to pure demand shocks, such as...

The profession has been longing for closed-form solutions to consumption functions under uncertainty and borrowing constraints. This paper proposes an analytical approach to solving buffer-stock saving models with both idiosyncratic and aggregate uncertainties. It is shown analytically that an...

This paper provides a method to analytically (or tractably) solve (S,s) inventory policies in general equilibrium. This solution method can handle large state space with many state variables, such as multiple capital stocks, lagged aggregate investment and consumption, and other predetermined...

have only limited) access to external funds

The research led by Gali (AER 1999) and Basu et al. (AER 2006) raises two important questions regarding the validity of the RBC theory: (i) How important are technology shocks in explaining the business cycle? (ii) Do impulse responses to technology shocks found in the data reject the assumption...

Financial capital and fixed capital tend to flow in opposite directions between poor and rich countries. Why? What are the implications of such two-way capital flows for global trade imbalances and welfare in the long run? This paper introduces frictions into a standard two-country neoclassical...

This paper develops an analytically tractable Bewley model of money featuring capital and financial intermediation. It is shown that when money is a vital form of liquidity to meet uncertain consumption needs, the welfare costs of inflation can be extremely large. With log utility and parameter...

Government spending plays an emportant role in determining economic performance in China. As an example, China's rapid recovery during the recent world financial crisis was due to its aggressive 4-trillion RMB government stimulus program. However, China's government spending programs are also...