How should monetary policy and macro-prudential regulation respond to the dangers of financial bubbles? I argue that bubbles - and their collapse - become a serious problem when there is inadequate risk-sharing. Neither monetary policy nor traditional macro-prudential regulation is designed to...

Theory suggests that greater hierarchical distance between a subordinate and his boss makes it more difficult to share abstract and subjective information in decision making. A novel dataset put together from credit dossiers of large corporate loan applicants enables us to observe the...

We show that institutions that promote financial development ease borrowing constraints by lowering the collateral spread and shifting the composition of acceptable collateral towards firm-specific assets. Collateral spread is defined as the difference in collateralization rates between high-...

<DIV>The Great American Recession resulted in the loss of eight million jobs between 2007 and 2009. More than four million homes were lost to foreclosures. Is it a coincidence that the United States witnessed a dramatic rise in household debt in the years before the recession—that the total amount...</div>

We show that deterioration in household balance sheets, or the housing net worth channel, played a significant role in the sharp decline in U.S. employment between 2007 and 2009. Counties with a larger decline in housing net worth experience a larger decline in non‐tradable employment. This...

Academic research, government inquiries, and press accounts show extensive mortgage fraud during the housing boom of the mid-2000s. We explore a particular type of mortgage fraud: the overstatement of income on mortgage applications. We define “income overstatement” in a zip code as the...

<DIV>The Great American Recession resulted in the loss of eight million jobs between 2007 and 2009. More than four million homes were lost to foreclosures. Is it a coincidence that the United States witnessed a dramatic rise in household debt in the years before the recession—that the total amount...</div>

We describe recent advances in the study of rent seeking and corruption in financial markets. We outline three areas of inquiry: (a) conceptualizing rent seeking, (b) identifying rent-provision channels and their general equilibrium impact, and (c) designing feasible remedial mechanisms. We...