Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...

The Great Recession has been characterised by the two stylized facts: the buildup of leverage in the household sector in the period preceding the recession and a protracted economic recovery that followed. We attempt to explain these two facts as an information friction, whereby agents are...