Many large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) continued to pay dividends during the recent financial crisis, even as financial market conditions deteriorated, large losses accumulated, and emergency capital and liquidity were being provided by the official sector. In contrast, share repurchases...

Using data from bank holding company regulatory reports, we examine the relationshipbetween stock repurchases and financial performance for a large sample of bank holding companies over the years 1987 to 1998. The primary result is that higher levels of repurchases in one year are associated...

Banks face two different kinds of moral hazard problems: asset substitution by shareholders (e.g., making risky, negative net present value loans) and managerial rent seeking (e.g., investing in inefficient 'pet' projects and consuming perquisites that yield private benefits). The privately...

This paper develops a simple dynamic model to examine the breakout from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It identifies several factors that determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without engendering declining living standards; this is termed maximum...

Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper...

We propose a class of prior distributions that discipline the long-run predictions of vector autoregressions (VARs). These priors can be naturally elicited using economic theory, which provides guidance on the joint dynamics of macroeconomic time series in the long run. Our priors for the long...

We study estimation and inference in panel data regression models when the regressors of interest are macro shocks, which speaks to a large empirical literature that targets impulse responses via local projections. Our results hold under general dynamics and are uniformly valid over the degree...

This paper develops a framework that allows us to combine the tools provided by structural models for economic interpretation and policy analysis with those of reduced-form models designed for nowcasting. We show how to map a quarterly dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model into a...

The low-frequency movements of many economic variables play a prominent role in policy analysis and decision-making. We develop a robust estimation approach for these slow-moving trend processes, which is guided by a judicious choice of priors and is characterized by sparsity. We present some...

We recover the persistent ("core") component of nominal wage growth over the past twenty-five years in the United States. Our approach combines worker-level data with time-series smoothing methods and can disentangle the common persistence of wage inflation from the persistence specific to some...