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...

From the onset of the 2007-2009 crisis, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have aggressively lowered interest rates. Both sets of changes are at odds with an anti-inflationary stance of monetary policy; indeed, as the crisis began in August 2007 inflation expectations were high...

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...

As Chari et al (2008) point out in a recent paper, aggregate trends are very hard to interpret. They examine four common claims about the impact of financial sector phenomena on the economy and conclude that all four claims are myths. We argue that to evaluate these popular claims, one needs to...

This paper will discuss a proposed method for the estimation of loss distribution using information from a combination of internally derived data and data from external sources. The relevant context for this analysis is the estimation of operational loss distributions used in the calculation of...

Using a unique dataset composed of female employees at a large medical organization, this paper explores the role of social interactions among female co-workers and neighbors in the decision to obtain breast cancer screening exams. In our theoretical framework, the experience of other women is...

The reintroduction of capital punishment after the end of the Supreme Court moratorium has permitted researchers to employ state level heterogeneity in the use of capital punishment to study deterrent effects. However, no scholarly consensus exists as to their magnitude. A key reason this has...

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

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...

Using a large sample of individual credit information provided by a US credit bureau, this paper investigates the empirical relevance of stigma and information sharing on household bankruptcy and its trend. Many observers of bankruptcy patterns have conjectured that there exists an increased...