During the U.S. National Banking Period (1863-1913), a network of correspondent banking relationships left the nation vulnerable to systemic risks, bank failures, and financial panics. We use comprehensive data on primary correspondent relationships for all national, state, savings, and private...

This paper documents several stylized facts on the real effects of economic uncertainty. First, higher uncertainty is associated with a more dispersed and negatively skewed distribution of output growth. Second, the response of economic growth to an increase in uncertainty is highly nonlinear...

Why are contracts not fully indexed? In a setting in which fully indexed contracts are feasible, we find that when price-level data are gathered with delay, these contracts are not renegotiation-proof. The contracts that replace them entail a lower level of welfare for the parties to that...

We analyze the contractual relation between workers and their employers when there is nominal risk. The key feature of the problem is that the consumption deflator is random and observed sometime after the effort is exerted. The worker's effort is not observable, and to induce the agent to work,...