The boom and subsequent bust in housing construction and prices over the 2000s is widely regarded as a principal contributor to the Financial Panic of 2007 and the subsequent Great Recession. As of this writing, housing market activity remains at depressed levels as the economy slowly resolves...

This paper develops an oligopolistic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D to examine how trade liberalization affects firm and industry productivity, as well as social welfare. We identify four effects of trade liberalization on productivity: (i) a direct...

We study the impact of learning-by-doing with spillovers in competitive markets with free market entry. Within a two period model, we consider first the case where fixed costs are incurred only once, and entry is once and for all. In the second case fixed costs are incurred in each period, and...

Self-fulfilling expectations are commonly believed to play an important role in the transmission of currency crises across countries. However, existing models that use multiple equilibria to illustrate the importance of such expectations have many undesirable features. This paper presents a new...

In this paper, we study the question whether suburbs should help finance the core public services of their central cities. We review three arguments that have been offered in favor of suburbs’ fiscal assistance to their central cities. First, the central city provides public services that...

We estimate a model of urban productivity in which the agglomeration effect of density is enhanced by a metropolitan area's stock of human capital. Estimation accounts for potential biases due to the endogeneity of density and industrial composition effects. Using new information on output per...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of sovereign risk transferring to corporates and...

Using a novel three-phase model based upon a conditional autoregressive Wishart (CAW) framework for the realized (co)variances of the US Dow Jones and the German stock index DAX, we analyze intra-daily volatility spillovers between the US and German stock markets. The proposed model explicitly...

Despite its importance, the microeconomics of the international transmission of shocks is not well understood. The conventional wisdom is that relative price changes are the primary mechanism by which shocks are transmitted across borders. Yet traded-goods prices exhibit significant inertia in...

This paper explores liquidity spillovers in market-capitalization-based portfolios of NYSE stocks. Return, volatility, and liquidity dynamics across the small- and large-cap sectors are modeled by way of a vector autoregression model, using data that spans more than 3,000 trading days. We find...