Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

"Most intervention studies have been silent on the assumed structure of the economic system--implicitly imposing implausible assumptions--despite the fact that inference depends crucially on such issues. This paper proposes to identify the cross-effects of intervention with the level and...

"This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal reserve check processing offices over 1980-2003. We use new unconditional quantile estimator of efficiency that avoids some drawbacks of other recently proposed estimators. The new estimator is fully non-parametric, robust with...