I characterize cyclical fluctuations in the cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Using the estimated dispersion, or "risk," stochastic process as an input to a baseline DSGE financial accelerator model, I assess how well the model reproduces...

A large literature documents a heterogeneous asset price response to macroeconomic news announcements. In order to explain these differences, we define the intrinsic value of a macroeconomic announcement as its ability to nowcast GDP growth, inflation and the federal funds target rate. We then...

The paper is based on a talk given in April 2010. It traces the roots of the recent financial crisis from development of the limited liability corporation, to separation of ownership from control, tax incentives for debt financing, investment bankers moving to the corporate form, government...

This paper provides a few variants of a simple estimator for binary choice models with endogenous or mismeasured regressors, or with heteroskedastic errors, or with panel fixed effects. Unlike control function methods, which are generally only valid when endogenous regressors are continuous, the...

By April 2013, the FCC's recent bill-shock agreement with cellular carriers requires consumers be notified when exceeding usage allowances. Will the agreement help or hurt consumers? To answer this question, we estimate a model of consumer plan choice, usage, and learning using a panel of...

We discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of four types of convenient estimators of binary choice models when regressors may be endogenous or mismeasured, or when errors are likely to be heteroskedastic. For example, such models arise when treatment is not randomly assigned and...

Assume individuals are treated if a latent variable, containing a continuous instrument, lies between two thresholds. We place no functional form restrictions on the latent errors. Here unconfoundedness does not hold and identification at infinity is not possible. Yet we still show nonparametric...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify, because consumption is measured at the household level, and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided...

Consumption is partly a social activity, yet most studies of consumer behavior treat households in isolation. We investigate familial relationships in consumption patterns using a sample of parents and their children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find a positive and statistically...

This paper is concerned with extending the familiar notion of fixed effects to nonlinear setups with infinite dimensional unobservables like preferences. The main result is that a generalized version of differencing identifies local average structural derivatives (LASDs) in very general...