Reverse mortgages allow elderly homeowners to tap into their housing wealth without having to sell or move out of their homes. However, very few eligible homeowners have used reverse mortgages to achieve consumption smoothing until recently when the reverse mortgage market in the United States...

I revisit the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation for nominal and real variables. I document an immoderation in corporate balance sheet variables so that the Great Moderation is best described as a period of divergent patterns in volatilities for real, nominal and financial variables. A...

Using U.S. data from 1929 to 2015, we show that elevated credit-market sentiment in year t-2 is associated with a decline in economic activity in years t and t+1. Underlying this result is the existence of predictable mean reversion in credit-market conditions. When credit risk is aggressively...

Which financial frictions matter in the aggregate? This paper presents a general equilibrium model in which entrepreneurs finance a firm with a long-term contract. The contract is constrained efficient because firm revenue is costly to monitor and entrepreneurs may default. The cost of...

Identifying the macroeconomic effects of credit supply disruptions is difficult because many of the same factors that influence the supply of bank loans can also affect the demand for credit. Using bank-level responses to the Federal Reserve's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey, we decompose the...

In a seminal article on small business lending, Petersen & Rajan (2002) argue that technological changes have revolutionized small business lending markets, weakening the reliance of small businesses on local lenders and increasing geographic distances between firms and their credit suppliers....

Employing a large number of financial indicators, we use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to forecast real-time measures of economic activity. The indicators include credit spreads based on portfolios -- constructed directly from the secondary market prices of outstanding bonds -- sorted by...

This paper demonstrates the important role of job displacement in the household bankruptcy decision. I develop a dynamic, forward-looking model of unemployment and bankruptcy where persistent negative income shocks increase a household's likelihood of filing for bankruptcy both immediately and...

In a seminal article on small business lending, Petersen & Rajan (2002) argue that technological changes have revolutionized small business lending markets, weakening the reliance of small businesses on local lenders and increasing geographic distances between firms and their credit suppliers....

I show that inter-firm lending plays an important role in business cycle fluctuations. I first build a tractable network model of the economy in which trade in intermediate goods is financed by supplier credit. In the model, a financial shock to one firm affects its ability to make payments to...