Participants in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regularly produce individual projections of real activity and inflation that are published in summary form. These summaries indicate participants' views about the most likely course for the macroeconomy but, by themselves, are...

The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates constrains the central bank's ability to stimulate the economy during downturns. We use the FRB/US model to quantify the effects of the bound on macroeconomic stabilization and to explore how policy can be designed to minimize these effects. During...

We exploit data on historical revisions to real-time estimates of the output gap to examine the implications of measurement error for the design of monetary policy, using the Federal Reserve's model of the U.S. economy, FRB/US. Measurement error brings about a substantial deterioration in...

Evidence since the 1980s suggests that the level and structure of executive compensation in U.S. public corporations are largely unresponsive to tax incentives. However, the relative tax advantage of different forms of pay has been relatively small during this period. Using a sample of top...

We analyze the structure and attributes of subprime mortgage-backed securitization deals originated between 1997 and 2007. Our data set allows us to link loan-level data for over 6.7 million subprime loans to the securitization deals into which the loans were sold. We show that the...

This paper finds no evidence that speculative activity in futures markets for industrial metals caused higher spot prices in recent years. The empirical analysis focuses on industrial metals with and without futures contracts and is organized around two key themes. First, I show that the...

In this paper we show the extent to which public insurance and self-insurance mitigate the cost of health shocks that limit the ability to work. We use consumption data from the UK to estimate the insurance provided by the government disability programme and account for the effectiveness of...

This paper investigates strategies for real-time estimation of the output gap. First, I examine estimates from univariate models with stochastic cycles. This corresponds to the use of model-based band-pass filters in real-time, and I find that the turning points in real-time and final output gap...

This paper studies the relative importance of the two main determinants of cyclical unemployment fluctuations: vacancy posting and job separation. Using a matching function to model the flow of new jobs, I draw on Shimer's (2007) unemployment flow rates decomposition and find that job separation...

This paper presents data from a new survey of low- and moderate-income households in Detroit to examine bank account usage and alternative financial service (AFS) products. We find that for the vast majority of households, annual outlays on financial services for transactional and credit...