In this paper, a human capital model is used to investigate the effects of occupational licensing and occupational certification on the wage rates of individual women. When we analyzed micro data available from the National Longitudinal Surveys of mature and young women, we found that licensed...

Despite financial economists' long-standing interest in the role of lender-borrower relationships in increasing the availability of funds to small businesses, many questions remain unanswered. Numerous empirical studies investigate the effect of relationships on the availability and terms of...

This dissertation examines the role of bank structure on the effectiveness of monetary policy. Using time series data for U.S. banks, I examine the varying effect of monetary policy on bank lending for the period 1976-2003. It is found that as the banking industry gets more concentrated (through...

Recent work on expectations suggests that professional forecasters may have incentives that lead them to make more extreme forecasts than they would make were accuracy the only criterion. We use the interest rate and exchange rate forecasts from the Wall Street Journal?s panel of economists to...