We lead off by discussing a number of theoretical reasons for expecting various relationships between a firm's unfunded pension liability and its market value. We then discuss our doubts about the methodology of earlier papers which studied the empirical relation between funding and market value...

As patent data become more available in machine-readable form, an increasing number of researchers have begun to use measures based on patents and their citations as indicators of technological output and information flow. This paper explores the economic meaning of these citation-based patent...

Japanese stock returns are even more closely related to their book-to-market ratios than are their U.S. counterparts, and thus provide a good setting for testing whether the return premia associated with these characteristics arise because the characteristics are proxies for covariance with...

Since 2012 the Congressional Budget Office has included an estimate of the market value of government-provided health insurance coverage in its measures of household income. We follow this practice for both public and private health insurance to capture the impact of greater access to...

We examine the evolution of international currency exposures, with a particular focus on the 2002-12 period. During the run up to the global financial crisis, there was a widespread shift towards positive net foreign currency positions, such that relatively few countries exhibited the archetypal...

I decompose Virginia's paper money into expected real-asset present value, risk discount, and transaction premium or “moneyness” value. The value of Virginia's paper money was determined primarily by its real-asset present value. The transaction premium was small. Positive risk discounts...

We use textual analysis of high-dimensional data from patent documents to create new indicators of technological innovation. We identify significant patents based on textual similarity of a given patent to previous and subsequent work: these patents are distinct from previous work but are...

This paper uses the theories of price discrimination and optimal taxation to investigate effects of underwater mortgages on foreclosures and the incentives to earn income, and the degree to which those effects are shaped by public policy. I find that the federal government's means-tested...

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use...