This paper analyzes options for reforming the U.S. housing finance system in view of the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). The options considered include GSE reform, a range of possible new governmental mortgage guarantee plans, and greater...

The covid-19 crisis has led to a sharp deterioration in firm and bank balance sheets. The government has responded with a massive intervention in corporate credit markets. We study equilibrium dynamics of macroeconomic quantities and prices, and how they are affected by government policy. The...

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...

Conventional wisdom suggests that small businesses are innovative engines of Schumpetarian growth. However, as small businesses, they are likely to face credit rationing in financial markets. If true then policies that promote lending to small businesses may yield substantial economy-wide...

We outline the case for supporting self-insurance by imposing a tax on external borrowing in a model of an emerging market. Entrepreneurs finance tangible investments via bank intermediation of foreign borrowing, exposing the economy to negative fire-sale externalities at times of deleveraging;...

We document capital misallocation in the U.S. investment-grade (IG) corporate bond market, driven by quantitative easing (QE). Prospective fallen angels -- risky firms just above the IG rating cutoff -- enjoyed subsidized bond financing since 2009, especially when the scale of QE purchases...

n this paper I examine changes in self-employment that have occurred since the early 1980s in the United States. It is a companion paper to a recent equivalent paper that related to the UK. Data on random samples of approximately twenty million US workers are examined taken from the Basic...

We show that a reduction in lender of last resort (LOLR) policy uncertainty posi-tively affects bank lending and propagates to investment and employment. We exploita unique policy that reduced uncertainty regarding the availability of future LOLRfunding for banks as a quasi-natural experiment....

We show that credit crises can be Self-Confirming Equilibria (SCE), which provides a new rationale for policy interventions like, for example, the FRB's TALF credit-easing program in 2009. We introduce SCE in competitive credit markets with directed search. These markets are efficient when...