The Innovation Union initiative of the European Union focuses on product and process innovation for tangible goods. The authors argue that it is essential to extend the scope of the initiative to include innovation for financial sector products, processes, and regulatory approaches. They make...

This paper 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...

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

Rapid house-price depreciation and rising unemployment were the main drivers of the huge increase in mortgage default during the downturn years of 2007 to 2010. However, mortgage default was also partly driven by an increased reliance on alternative mortgage products such as pay-option ARMs and...

The current era of globalization is dominated by the rise of investments in intangible capital rather than tangible capital — the ascendance of creativity over plant and equipment. This brief paper is motivated by the possibility that emerging market economies such as Morocco might take...

GDP is a closely watched indicator of the current health of the economy and an important tool of economic policy. It has been called one of the great inventions of the 20th century. It is not, however, a persuasive indicator of individual well-being or economic progress. There have been calls to...

Brent Moulton and Nicole Mayerhauser (2015) point out that, for more than 50 years, economists have featured the concept of human capital in their models of labor, growth, productivity, and distribution of income. The authors recommend the addition to the System of National Accounts (SNA) of...

August 2013, Revised December 2014 Rapid house-price depreciation and rising unemployment were the main drivers of the huge increase in mortgage default during the downturn years of 2007 to 2010. However, mortgage default was also associated with an increased reliance on alternative mortgage...

Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year, but appraisals are rarely below the transaction price. We exploit a unique data set to show that the mortgage application process creates an incentive to substitute the transaction price for the true...

In this paper we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal...