The debate over modernizing the financial structure is raising questions about the merits of modernizing the financial regulatory structure. Regulatory structure is important because an almost unavoidable feature of our current system of government is that Congress assigns multiple goals that...

Firms with private information about the outcomes of production under uncertainty may face capital (liquidity) constraints that prevent them from attaining efficient levels of investment in a world with costly and/or imperfect monitoring. As an alternative, we examine the efficiency of a simple...

In this paper, we extend the parametric, asymmetric, stochastic volatility model (ASV), where returns are correlated with volatility, by flexibly modeling the bivariate distribution of the return and volatility innovations nonparametrically. Its novelty is in modeling the joint, conditional,...

This paper assesses the trade-off between acquiring specialized skills targeted for a particular occupation and acquiring a package of skills that diversifies risk across occupations. Individual-level data on college credits across subjects and labor-market dynamics reveal that diversification...

Using a neoclassical monetary model, we investigate the welfare cost of a payment system that operates as a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system. We illustrate how the cost of such systems does not ultimately derive from factors such as "payments gridlock" but instead from the credit...

Existing theories that emphasize the significance of financial intermediation for economic development have not addressed two important empirical facts: (i) the relationship between financial and real activities depends crucially on the stage of development, and (ii) financial and industrial...

Strategic interjurisdictional behavior and the interaction over time of the mean and dispersion of average tax rates across states are analyzed in a vector autoregression model. Variance decompositions reveal that fiscal competition explains roughly one-third of the time variation of state and...

In the existing literature, conditional forecasts in the vector autoregressive (VAR) framework have not been commonly presented with probability distributions or error bands. This paper develops Bayesian methods for computing such distributions or bands. It broadens the class of conditional...

The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behavior of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative...

We build a model of financial sector illiquidity in an open economy. Illiquidity is defined as a situation in which a country's consolidated financial system has potential short-term obligations that exceed the amount of foreign currency available on short notice. We show that illiquidity is key...