We estimate the effect of the reduction in credit supply that followed the 2008 financial crisis on the real economy. We predict county lending shocks using variation in pre-crisis bank market shares and estimated bank supply-shifts. Counties with negative predicted shocks experienced declines...

Time-inconsistency of no-bailout policies can create incentives for banks to take excessive risks and generate endogenous crises when the government cannot commit. However, at the outbreak of financial problems, usually the government is uncertain about their nature, and hence it may delay...

The recent banking crisis highlights the challenges faced in credit intermediation. New online peer-to-peer lending markets offer opportunities to examine lending models that primarily cater to small borrowers and that generate more types of information on which to screen. This paper evaluates...

This paper explores the practice of mortgage refinancing in a dynamic competitive lending model with risky borrowers and costly default. We show that prepayment penalties improve welfare by ensuring longer-term lending contracts, which prevents the mortgage pools from becoming disproportionately...

We use data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to compare point forecasts of GDP growth and inflation with the subjective probability distributions held by forecasters. We find that SPF forecasters summarize their underlying distributions in different ways and that their summaries tend...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market---rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities---led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates more vigorously in the recent recession than the European Central Bank did. By comparison with the Fed, the ECB followed a more measured course of action. We use an estimated dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions to show that...

Forecasting using `diffusion indices' has received a good deal of attention in recent years. The idea is to use the common factors estimated from a large panel of data to help forecast the series of interest. This paper assesses the extent to which the forecasts are influenced by (i) how the...

The current literature has provided a number of important insights about the effects of macroeconomic data releases on monetary policy expectations and asset prices. However, one puzzling aspect of that literature is that the estimated responses are quite small. Indeed, these studies typically...

The optimal weights on indicators in models with partial information about the state of the economy and forward-looking variables are derived and interpreted, both for equilibria under discretion and under commitment. The private sector is assumed to have information about the state of the...