The present crisis is the bottom of a recurring problem that I call the leverage cycle, in which leverage gradually rises too high then suddenly falls much too low. The government must manage the leverage cycle in normal times by monitoring and regulating leverage to keep it from getting too...

Information on the performance of equities during the latter part of the globalized long nineteenth century is scarce, particularly for smaller European economies such as Ireland. Using a dataset of over 35,000 price-year observations from the Investor's Monthly Manual, this paper constructs new...

This paper proposes a new nonparametric test for conditional independence, which is based on the comparison of Bernstein copula densities using the Hellinger distance. The test is easy to implement because it does not involve a weighting function in the test statistic, and it can be applied in...

I study the macroeconomic and asset pricing implications of variations in information quality in a real business cycle model. Learning and fluctuating information quality generate changes in the perception of macroeconomic outcomes, but do not modify the distribution of realized shocks. On the...

We propose a novel procedure to identify the marginal stock market investor's beliefs from observed asset prices. Our approach recovers price-consistent beliefs, i.e. the distribution of macro and financial variables that satisfy the conditional Euler equations, given a cross-section of assets,...

We propose a novel information-theoretic approach to separately identify the risk preferences and beliefs of different types of financial market investors. Investors who allocate most of their wealth in large market capitalization stocks are risk averse and believe that the aggregate stock...

This paper identifies total factor productivity (TFP) news shocks using standard VAR methodology and documents a new stylized fact: in response to news about future increases in TFP, inventories rise and comove positively with other major macroeconomic aggregates. The authors show that the...

This essay examines the state of the United States economy as it emerges from the 2001 recession. A comparison of several central economic variables indicates that the 2001 recession was the mildest recession in the postwar period. In light of highly differentiated characteristics of recessions,...

Waiting lists offer agents a choice between types of items with associated nonmonetary prices given by required waiting times. These nonmonetary prices are endogenously determined by a tâtonnement-like price discovery process: an item's price increases when an agent queues for it, and decreases...