One of the more dramatic financial events of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the surge in Japanese stock prices that was immediately followed by a very sharp decline of more than 50 percent. While the unprecedented fluctuations in Japanese stock prices were domestic financial shocks, the...

The stock of real estate loans held by New England Banks has declined dramatically. Given the limited potential for real estate investments, weak demand for real estate loans is to be expected. However supply as well as demand for real estate factors may account for some of the decline in bank...

A key provision of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 was prompt corrective action (PCA). PCA emphasized early intervention by bank supervisors and was intended to limit forbearance by making supervisory intervention more timely and less discretionary. However,...

The dramatic reduction in the growth rate of bank lending associated with the 1990-91 recession, particularly in New England that has evoked claims by many observers of a credit crunch. However because of the difficulty in determining whether the observed slow credit growth is a demand or supply...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-riding-proof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously...

We evaluate alternative models of the volatility of commodity futures prices based on high-frequency intraday data from the crude oil futures markets for the October 2001-December 2012 period. These models are implemented with a simple GMM estimator that matches sample moments of the realized...

We examine the effect of scheduled macroeconomic announcements made by China on world financial and commodity futures markets. All announcements related to Chinese manufacturing and industrial output move stock markets, energy and industrial commodities as well as commodity currencies. News...

This paper models the tradeoff, perceived by central banks and other public actors, between providing the public with useful information and the risk of overwhelming it with excessive communication. An information authority chooses how many signals to provide regarding an aggregate state and...

This paper analyzes the impact of consumer uncertainty on optimal fiscal policy in a model with capital. The consumers lack confidence about the probability model that characterizes the stochastic environment and so apply a max-min operator to their optimization problem. An altruistic fiscal...

This paper considers whether the Phillips curve can explain the recent behavior of inflation in the United States. Standard formulations of the model predict that the ongoing large shortfall in economic activity relative to full employment should have led to deflation over the past several...