Which is more likely to encourage creativity and innovation: a centralized or a decentralized system of support? That is, should large organizations and recognized experts determine who gets funding for their ideas? Or should small businesses, patrons, and foundations provide the primary support...

From 1900 to 1935, Argentina evolved from an economy highly dependent on external, primarily British, finance to one more nearly self-sufficient. We examine the failure of domestic finance to adequately fill the void left by the decline of London and the breakdown of the world financial system...

Swedish law mandates the removal of information about past credit arrears from the individuals’ credit reports after three years. By exploiting a quasi-experimental variation in retention times caused by a change in the credit bureau’s timing of arrear removal, we are able to examine the...

Supersedes Working Paper 10-22 This paper sets forth a discussion framework for the information requirements of systemic financial regulation. It specifically describes a potential large macro-micro database for the U.S. based on an extended version of the Flow of Funds. I argue that such a...

With house prices often below the face value of mortgages these days, the expected return on many mortgages has tumbled, since one of the major forces supporting mortgages, the collateral, has weakened. One source of these mortgage problems has been the validity of the home appraisal, which is...

The authors empirically study how the underlying riskiness of the pool of home equity line of credit originations is affected over the credit cycle. Drawing from the largest existing database of U.S. home equity lines of credit, they use county-level aggregates of these loans to estimate panel...

This paper sets forth a discussion framework for the information requirements of systemic financial regulation. It specifically describes a potentially large macro-micro database for the U.S. based on an extended version of the Flow of Funds. I argue that such a database would have been of...

This paper argues that the rate of intangible investment – investment in the development and marketing of new products – accelerated in the wake of the electronics revolution in the 1970s. The paper presents preliminary direct and indirect empirical evidence that US private firms currently...