During the Great Recession and its aftermath, state and local governments’ revenue streams dried up due to diminished taxes. Budget cuts affected many aspects of government; in this paper, we investigate whether (and how) local school districts modified their funding and taxing decisions in...

We provide a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call dynamic pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, with and without financial frictions, for output...

Since the end of the Great Recession, growth in health care spending has declined to historically low levels. There is disagreement over whether this decline was caused by falling incomes during the Great Recession (and therefore is likely to reverse once the recovery is complete) or whether the...

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, but replace the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student's t-distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that 1) the...

The years following the Great Recession were challenging for forecasters. Unlike other deep downturns, this recession was not followed by a swift recovery, but generated a sizable and persistent output gap that was not accompanied by deflation as a traditional Phillips curve relationship would...

This paper documents macroeconomic forecasting during the global financial crisis by two key central banks: the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The paper is the result of a collaborative effort between the two institutions, allowing us to study the time-stamped...

We employ a model of leverage-induced explosive behavior in financial markets to develop a measure of financial market instability. Specifically, we derive a quantitative condition for how large levered investors can become relative to the whole market before the demand curve for securities...

We study market reactions to seasoned equity issuances that were announced by financial companies between 2002 and 2013. To assess the risk and valuation implications of these seasoned equity issuances, we conduct an event analysis using daily credit default swap (CDS) and stock market pricing...

We describe and evaluate the measures taken by the U.S. government to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008. We begin by outlining the business model of these two firms and their role in the U.S. housing finance system. Our focus then turns to the sources of financial distress that...

The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is a widely used indicator of funding conditions in the interbank market. As of 2013, LIBOR underpins more than $300 trillion of financial contracts, including swaps and futures, in addition to trillions more in variable-rate mortgage and student loans....