Other risk-inviting rules historically have involved government-imposed structural constraints on banks, which include entry restrictions like unit banking laws that constrain competition, prevent diversification of risk, and limit the ability to deal with shocks. Another destabilizing rule of...

This study offers the first empirical microeconomic analysis of the effectiveness of dollar debt and contract redenomination policies to mitigate adverse financial and relative price consequences from a large devaluation. An analysis of Argentina's policy of devaluation with redenomination in...

The high social costs of financial crises imply that economists, policymakers, businesses, and households have a tremendous incentive to understand, and try to prevent them. And yet, so far we have failed to learn how to avoid them. In this article, we take a novel approach to studying financial...

We study the performance of many traditional and novel, text-based variables for in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting of oil spot, futures, and energy company stock returns, and changes in oil volatility, production, and inventories. After controlling for small-sample biases, we find evidence...

Models used to guide policy, as well as some empirical studies, suggest that the effect of housing wealth on consumption is large and greater than the wealth effect on consumption from stock holdings. Recent theoretical work, in contrast, argues that changes in housing wealth are offset by...

We investigate the determinants of slave family discounts, using data from the New Orleans slave market. We find large price discounts for families which cannot be explained by scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport costs. Because family members cared for each other,...

We document the market response to an unexpected announcement of proposed sales of government-owned shares in China. In contrast to the "privatization premium" found in earlier work, we find a negative effect of government ownership on returns at the announcement date and a symmetric positive...

We investigate how banking relationships that combine lending and underwriting services affect the terms of lending, through both loan supply- and loan demand-side effects, and the underwriting costs of debt and equity issues. We capture and control for firm characteristics, including...

The costs of government assistance to banks depend on the way rescues are managed. The cnetral questions of policy reference do not revolve around whether to bail out banks, but rather around the choice of which banks to rescue and the means for doing so. If a rescue is handled skillfully, the...

To understand a price boom, it is helpful to take account of: (1) observable indicators of changes in ex ante risk tolerance, (2) what information exists and when, and (3) the incentives lenders face. This paper takes such an approach to the Florida land boom of the mid-1920s, the U.S.' first...