This paper finds strong evidence that many individuals choose to pay credit card bills even at the cost of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures. While the popular press and some recent literature have suggested that this choice may emerge from steep declines in housing prices, we find...

The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank aggressively lowered interest rates during the recent crisis. Both actions were at odds with an anti-inflationary policy stance: in August 2007, inflation expectations were high, particularly in the United States. To explain these actions, we...

Much existing literature on age-earnings variation has focused on identifying the connection between ability and wage and salary income. This is often done through the careful selection of an instrument, believed to be correlated with ability but not with earnings, and typically for data on...

The linear-in-means model has been a theoretical and empirical workhorse of the social interactions field. As was noted by Manski (1993), the collinearity between group-level 'contextual' and 'endogenous' effects leads to an inability to identify the structural parameters of this model. Manski...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of peers on own outcomes where all agents embedded in a network choose more than one activity. We develop a simple network model that illustrates these issues. We differentiate between the ‘seemingly unrelated’ simultaneous equations model where...

This paper proposes a model of network interactions in the interbank market. Our innovation is to model systemic risk in the interbank network as the propagation of incentives or strategic behavior rather than the propagation of losses after default. Transmission in our model is not based on...

We study the profitability of traders in two fully electronic and highly liquid markets: the Dow and Standard & Poor׳s 500 e-mini futures markets. Using unique information that identify counterparties to a transaction, we show and seek to explain the fact that the network pattern of trades...

The reintroduction of capital punishment in 1976 that ended the four-year moratorium on executions generated by the Supreme Court in the 1972 decision Furman v. Georgia has permitted researchers to employ state-level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects....

"As empirical work in identifying social effects becomes more prevalent, researchers are beginning to struggle in identifying the composition of social interactions within any given reference group. In this article, we present a simple econometric methodology for the separate identification of...