We show that consumers spend 15% more per day on their credit cards in the ten days following the receipt of a credit card statement than in the days prior to the statement. We test several mechanisms for this effect including mental accounting, optimization of the free float, and liquidity...

This paper examines how financial reporting regulations affect, and respond to, macroeconomic cycles by exploring a positive framework in which regulators subject to political pressures respond to cyclical demands by borrowers and lenders. We establish that, as economic conditions initially...

The United States experienced dramatic swings in fertility over the course of the early- and mid-20th century. This paper presents a novel explanation for these changes, linking the Great Depression to the contemporaneous fertility bust in the early 1930s, the baby boom from the late-1930s...

It is well known fact that all good things, as also bad things, come to an end and business cycles pass through good and bad economic times. Economically 2010 was a year of transition from economic recession to recovery. Economies were improving in some countries and industries were showing...

This paper builds a banking DSGE model based on endogenous loan to value ratios, taking the different relationship between different types of enterprises and banks into account. Due to the political connections between the bank and enterprises, loan to value ratio for favored enterprises (e.g....

We present a model in which banks and other financial intermediaries face both occasionally binding borrowing constraints and costs of equity issuance. Near the steady state, these intermediaries can raise equity finance at no cost through retained earnings. However, even moderately large shocks...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

We present a model in which investors observe the same macroeconomic data but have varying levels of information about the parameters that determine the distribution of the expected returns on investment. During a crisis that increases macroeconomic uncertainty and reduces asset prices, the...

This paper elaborates on the link between financial market volatility and real economic activity. Using monthly data for Germany from 1968 to 1998, we specify GARCH models to capture the variability of stock market prices, of the real exchange rate, and of a long-term and of a short-term rate of...

We study a stylized theory of the volatility reduction in the U.S. after 1984 - the Great Moderation - which attributes part of the stabilization to less volatile shocks and another part to more difficult inference on the part of Bayesian households attempting to learn the latent state of the...