In this paper we investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic...

The national economy is often described as having a business cycle over which aggregate output enters and exits distinct expansion and recession phases. Analogously, national employment cycles in and out of its own expansion and contraction phases, which are closely related to the business...

According to Ljungqvist and Sargent (1998), high European unemployment since the 1980s can be explained by a rise in economic turbulence, leading to greater numbers of unemployed workers with obsolete skills. These workers refuse new jobs due to high unemployment benefits. In this paper we...

We employ a comprehensive matched employer-employee data set for Brazil to analyze wage determinants and compare results to Abowd, Kramarz, Margolis and Troske (2001) for French and U.S. manufacturing. Returns to education and experience in Brazilian manufacturing exceed those of the other...

We introduce avoidable fixed costs into the capacity and entry model of Dixit (1980) to produce a coordination problem among multiple postentry equilibria. Elimination of weakly dominated strategies makes it possible for the entrant to play a knockout strategy, consisting of a large capacity...

We show that when relevant market information such as price is difficult to communicate, advertising plays a key role in bringing about optimal coordination of purchase behavior: an efficient firm uses advertising expenditures in place of price to inform sophisticated consumers that it offers a...

We consider communication of quality via cheap talk and dissipative advertising, when consumers have heterogeneous tastes for quality. For search goods, cheap talk communicates quality when fixed costs are roughly constant across quality levels, while if fixed costs vary greatly with quality,...