In his widely discussed book "Fault Lines" (2010), Raghuram Rajan argues that many U.S. consumers have reacted to the decline in their relative permanent incomes since the early 1980s by reducing saving and increasing debt. This has temporarily kept private consumption and thus aggregate demand...

In this paper, I estimate a series of long run reallocative shocks to sectoral employment using a stochastic volatility model of sectoral employment growth for the United States from 1960 through 2011. Reallocative shocks (which primarily measure construction and technology busts) have little...

We recently experienced a global financial crisis so severe that only massive rescue operations by governments around the world prevented a total financial market meltdown and perhaps another global Great Depression. One necessary precondition for the crisis was the perverse, bonus-driven...

The recent crisis of 2008 has revealed several challenges for the economic science, sparking a considerable amount of debate regarding the profession of economists and the role of macroeconomics and monetary policies. The first question that arose was why there was a lack of anticipation of the...

This paper decomposes issue spreads on USD-denominated bonds issued during the period between mid-2005 and mid-2010 into credit risk and liquidity premium components. Regression analysis shows that the behaviour of the credit risk component is well-explained by a structural model of default,...

I study broker-dealers' trading activity in the US corporate bond market. I find evidence of broker-dealer market making when customers both buy and sell a bond in a day, which happens half of the time: as predicted by market making theories with adverse selection or inventory costs, prices go...

In this paper, we estimate the risk spillovers among 74 U.S. REITs using the state-dependent sensitivity value-at-risk (SDSVaR) approach. This methodology allows for the quantification of the spillover size as a function of a company's financial condition (tranquil, normal, and volatile REIT...

In this paper, we estimate the risk spillovers among 74 U.S. REITs using the state-dependent sensitivity value-at-risk (SDSVaR) approach. This methodology allows for the quantification of the spillover size as a function of a company's financial condition (tranquil, normal, and volatile REIT...

This paper examines the evolution of intra-financial sector lending in the United States, 1950- 2012, presenting estimates constructed from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds Accounts. We establish a number of stylized facts concerning the growth and composition of claims between financial...