Microeconomic flexibility, by facilitating the process of creative destruction, is at the core of economic growth in modern market economies. The main reason why this process is not infinitely fast is the presence of adjustment costs, some of them technological, others institutional. Chief among...

In this note we discuss the findings in Piskorski, Seru, and Vig (2010), as well as the authors' interpretation of their results. First, we find that small changes to the set of covariates used by PSV significantly reduce the magnitude of the differences in foreclosure rates between securitized...

Shiller (2003) and others have argued for the creation of financial instruments that allow households to insure risks associated with their lifetime labor income. In this paper, we argue that while the purpose of such assets is to smooth consumption across states of nature, one must also...

We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

We propose that individuals consider future versions of themselves to truly be separate persons, not simply as a convenient modeling device but in terms of actual brain systems and decision-making processes. Intertemporal choices are thus quite literally strategic interactions between multiple...

This paper surveys a variety of topics related to network economics. Topics covered include: consumer demand under network effects, compatibility decisions and standardization, technology advances in network industries, two-sided markets, information networks and intellectual property, and...

This paper investigates the performance of real estate auctions in selling real estate relative to the more traditional method of negotiated sale. Estimates from auctions in Los Angeles during the boom of the mid 1980s show a discount that ranges between 0 and 9 percent, while similar sales in...

This study estimates a model of overlapping nominal price contracts over three distinct monetary policy regimes, testing the stability of the parameters in the model across regimes. Upon finding a model that is stable over the three subsamples, the model then holds for the most recent monetary...

The dramatic 70 percent decline in Japanese commercial real estate prices from their peak in 1990 provides a natural experiment to test the extent to which a loan supply shock can affect real economic activity. Because the shock was external to U.S. credit markets, yet connected through the...

This paper extends the sticky-price models of Fuhrer and Moore (1995a,b) to include explicit, optimization-based consumption and investment decisions. The goal is to use the resulting model for monetary policy analysis; consequently, strong emphasis is placed on empirical validation of the...