Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries by conducting large-scale incentivized online...

During the early years of its existence, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set on all aspects of the pre-WWII macroeconomy. Until 1978, this data set existed only on the handwritten sheets to which the early NBER researchers copied the data from original...

This paper uses high frequency data to detect shifts in financial markets' perception of the Federal Reserve stance on inflation. We construct daily revisions to expectations of future nominal interest rates and inflation that are priced into nominal and inflation-protected bonds, and find that...

Cross-sectional forecasts of conservative and optimistic biases in analyst earnings estimates predict a stock's future returns, especially for firms that are hard to value. Trading strategies--whether based on the component of analyst bias that is correlated with major return anomalies or the...

We use a large cross-section of equity returns to estimate a rich affine model of equity prices, dividends, returns and their dynamics. Using the model, we price dividend strips of the aggregate market index, as well as any other well-diversified equity portfolio. We do not use any dividend...

We use arbitrage activity in equity, fixed income, and foreign exchange markets to characterize the frictions and constraints facing intermediaries. The average pairwise correlation between the 29 arbitrage spreads that we study is 21%. These low correlations are inconsistent with canonical...

This paper measures option-implied skewness for individual firms and the overall stock market between 1980 and 2021, giving real-time measures of conditional micro and macro skewness. There are three key results: 1. Micro skewness is significantly procyclical, while macro skewness is acyclical;...

Many business opportunities feature second-mover advantages as there are often positive spillovers and externalities from early entrants to followers. We develop a tractable stochastic duopoly entry game with a second-mover advantage. We show that firms engage in a war-of-attrition game with the...

For investors, gold is an asset without a yield that is attractive in times of low and negative real interest rates. Gold also has an embedded put option because investors can sell it to those who value its use as jewelry or as a productive input. This paper presents an approach for pricing gold...