We document several empirical regularities regarding the evolution of urban structure in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1980-1990. These regularities relate to changes in resident population, employment, occupations, as well as the number and size of establishments in...

This article emphasizes the role of nonprice rationing in credit crunches. It proposes a process for identifying credit crunches centered on the political economy of the period under study. The process is applied to the U.S. for the 1960-92 period, and a variable is constructed that indicates...

Since early 1990, the results of the Federal Reserve Board's Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices have been cited frequently as an indicator of general credit availability. Results from the Board's survey suggest that a considerable share of respondent banks were...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented...

By compiling a novel dataset from bankruptcy court dockets recorded in Delaware between 2001 and 2002, we build and estimate a structural model of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. This allows us to quantify how key debtor characteristics, including whether they are experiencing bankruptcy for the first...

Following recent cross-country empirical work, research on public policy and growth has come to examine the impact of inefficient or corrupt bureaucracies. Most of this work has emphasized the interactions of bureaucracies with private markets. By contrast, this paper focuses on the relationship...

This paper explores the links among growth, the informal economy, and rent-seeking bureaucracies. The presence of congestion associated with the enforcement of property right implies that informality can be useful. Whether bureaucratic rent-seeking is detrimental to growth then depends on how...

Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation requiring a means test for Chapter 7 filers. This paper explores the effects of such a reform in a model where, in contrast to previous work, bankruptcy options and production are...

Whether technological progress raises or lowers aggregate employment in the short run has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Using a simple model of industry employment, we show that cross-industry differences of inventory holding costs, demand elasticities, and price rigidities...