Oil prices rose sharply prior to the onset of the 2007-2009 recession. Hamilton (2005) noted that nine of the last ten recessions in the United States were preceded by a substantial increase in the price of oil. In this paper, we consider whether oil price shocks significantly increase the...

A large literature studies the information contained in national-level economic indicators, such as financial and aggregate economic activity variables, for forecasting and nowcasting U.S. business cycle phases (expansions and recessions.) In this paper, we investigate whether there is...

No. In this paper we use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether affordable housing policies influenced origination or affected prices of subprime mortgages. We use merged loan-level data on non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data for...

We investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic characteristics...

We reexamine the relationship between school quality and house prices and find it to be nonlinear. Unlike most studies in the literature, we find that the price premium parents must pay to buy a house associated with a better school increases as school quality increases. This is true even after...

We simultaneously identify two government spending shocks: military spending shocks as defined by Ramey (2008) and federal spending shocks as defined by Perotti (2008). We analyze the effect of these shocks on state-level personal income and employment. We find regional patterns in the manner in...

Recent studies using long-run restrictions question the validity of the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis. We propose an alternative identification that maximizes the contribution of technology shocks to the forecast-error variance of labor productivity at a long, but finite,...

Smooth-transition autoregressive (STAR) models have proven to be worthy competitors of Markov-switching models of regime shifts, but the assumption of a time-invariant threshold level does not seem realistic and it holds back this class of models from reaching their potential usefulness. Indeed,...

Numerous commentaries have questioned both the legality and appropriateness of Federal Reserve lending to banks during the recent financial crisis. This article addresses two questions motivated by such commentary: 1) Did the Federal Reserve violate either the letter or spirit of the law by...

Recently, some analysts and economists had warned that the U.S. economy faces a much higher risk of falling into a recession should the price of oil rise to $100 per barrel or more. In February 2008, spot crude oil prices closed above $100 per barrel for the first time ever, and they have since...