This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004-2007. Even after controlling for credit score and other key risk factors, African-American and Hispanic home buyers are 105 and 78 percent more likely to have high cost...

We propose a theory of optimal fiscal policy consistent with the observation that governments typically inherit their predecessors' plans and formulate their policies over a finite future horizon. We use this framework, which we call “Limited-Time Commitment" (LTC), to make two contributions....