The acceleration of productivity since 1995 has prompted a debate over whether the economy's underlying growth rate will remain high. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating trend growth that draws on growth theory to identify variables other than productivity - namely consumption...

I present evidence that the cross-guarantee authority granted to the FDIC by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 has unexpectedly strengthened the Federal Reserve's source-of-strength doctrine. In particular, I find that a bank affiliated with a multi-bank...

Debit cards are overtaking credit cards as the most prevalent form of electronic payment at the point of sale, yet the determinants of a ubiquitous consumer choice - "debit or credit?" - have received relatively little scrutiny. Several stylized facts suggest that debit-card use is driven by...

"This paper uses a game-theoretic model to analyze the disincentive effects of low-tuition policies on student effort. The model of parent and student responses to tuition subsidies is then calibrated using information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the High School and...

"This paper develops a new approach to change-point modeling that allows for an unknown number of change points in the observed sample. Our model assumes that regime durations have a Poisson distribution. The model approximately nests the two most common approaches: the time-varying parameter...