We document that the quasi-mandatory U.S. flood insurance program reduces mortgage lending along both the extensive and intensive margins. We measure flood insurance mandates using FEMA flood maps, focusing on the discreet updates to these maps that can be made exogenous to true underlying flood...

I take a new approach to measuring world inequality and welfare over time by constructing robust bounds for these series instead of imposing parametric assumptions to compute point estimates. I derive sharp bounds on the Atkinson inequality index that are valid for any underlying distribution of...

Central banks analyze a wide range of data to obtain better measures of underlying inflationary pressures. Factor models have widely been used to formalize this procedure. Using a dynamic factor model this paper develops a measure of underlying inflation (UIG) at time horizons of relevance for...

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...

Inflation is often assumed to affect all people in the same way. In practice, differences in spending patterns across households and differences in price increases across goods and services lead to unequal levels of inflation for different households. In this paper, we measure the degree of...

We measure dislocations in the market for corporate bonds in real time with the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), allowing for the aggregation of a broad set of measures of market functioning from primary and secondary bond markets into a single measure. The index quantifies...

We propose a new, computationally-efficient way to approximate the "grouped fixed-effects" (GFE) estimator of Bonhomme and Manresa (2015), which estimates grouped patterns of unobserved heterogeneity. To do so, we generalize the fuzzy C-means objective to regression settings. As the...

We propose two new jump-robust estimators of integrated variance based on highfrequency return observations. These MinRV and MedRV estimators provide an attractive alternative to the prevailing bipower and multipower variation measures. Specifically, the MedRV estimator has better theoretical...

This note corrects a mistake in the estimation algorithm of the time-varying structural vector autoregression model of Primiceri (2005) and proposes a new algorithm that correctly applies the procedure proposed by Kim, Shephard, and Chib (1998) to the estimation of VAR or DSGE models with...

We investigate the factor structure of the term structure of interest rates and argue that characterizing the minimal dimension of the data-generating process is more challenging than currently appreciated. To circumvent these difficulties, we introduce a novel nonparametric bootstrap that is...