We investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood- level data on racial and ethnic characteristics...

We examine the welfare properties of alternative regimes of interjurisdictional competition for heterogenous mobile firms. Firms differ not only in terms of the degree of mobility across jurisdictions but also in terms of productivity. Alternative taxation regimes represent restraints on the...

In this paper we provide estimates of the coefficient of relative risk aversion for 80 countries using data on self-reports of personal well-being from the Gallup World Poll. For most countries we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 1. We...

Past studies have argued that housing is an important driver of business cycles. Housing markets, however, are highly localized, while business cycles are often measured at the national level. We model a national housing cycle using a panel of cities while also allowing for idiosyncratic...

This paper applies regime-switching methods to the problem of measuring monetary policy. Policy preferences and structural factors are specified parametrically as independent Markov processes. Interaction between the structural and preference parameters in the policy rule serves to identify the...