The recent housing bust has reignited interest in psychological theories of speculative excess (Shiller, 2007). I investigate this issue by identifying a segment of the U.S. population-evangelical protestants-that may be less prone to speculative motives, and uncover a significant negative...

This paper tests the role of different banks' liquidity funding structures in explaining the banks' failures, which occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks' probability of default. By confirming...

We present evidence of a risk-taking channel of monetary policy for the U.S. banking system. We use confidential data on the internal ratings of U.S. banks on loans to businesses over the period 1997 to 2011 from the Federal Reserve’s survey of terms of business lending. We find that ex-ante...

Abstract Empirical evidence is mounting that, in advanced economies, changes in monetary policy have a more benign impact on the economy—given better anchored inflation expectations and inflation being less responsive to variation in unemployment—compared to the past. We examine another...

This paper asks how well Okun’s Law fits short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in twenty advanced economies since 1980. We find that Okun’s Law isa strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantiallyduring the Great...

Building on recent work on the role of speculation and inventories in oil markets, we embed a competitive oil storage model within a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. This enables us to formally analyze the impact of a (speculative) storage demand shock and to assess how the effects of various...

Technological progress in the exploration and production of oil and gas during the 2000s has led to a boom in upstream investment and has increased the domestic supply of fossil fuels. It is unknown, however, how many jobs this boom has created. We use time-series methods at the national level...

For a sample of 83 financial institutions during 2003–2011, this paper attempts to answer three questions: first, what is the evolution of banks’ stock price exposure to country-level and global risk factors as approximated by equity indices; second, which bank-specific characteristics...

This paper uses a novel variant of identification through hetroscedacity to estimate spillovers across U.S., Euro area, Japanese, and UK government bond and equity markets in a vector autoregression. The results suggest that U.S. financial shocks reverberate around the world much more strongly...

The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) fell dramatically following the Great Recession and has yet to start recovering. A key question is how much of the post-2007 decline is reversible, something which is central to the policy debate. The key finding of this paper is that while around...