I apply mechanism design to quantify the cost of inflation that can be attributed to monetary frictions alone. In an environment with pairwise meetings, the money demand that is consistent with a constrained-efficient allocation takes the form of a continuous correspondence that can fit the data...

We measure the distribution of firms' financial soundness over most of the last century for a broad cross section of firms. We highlight three main findings for this key aggregate state variable. First, the three worst recessions between 1926 and 2012 coincided with sharp deteriorations in the...

Building on the Merton (1974) and Leland (1994) structural models of credit risk, we develop a simple, transparent, and robust method for measuring the financial soundness of individual firms using data on their equity volatility. We use this method to retrace quantitatively the history of...