With the failure of the Congressional "supercommittee," national attention is once more focused on the issue of ever-mounting federal budget deficits. This paper provides a primer on budget deficits, and surpluses from the creation of the federal government. From 1790 to 2010, government...

This paper documents a new high risk-low return puzzle. Specfically, we find that a forward-looking risk measure extracted from credit line undrawn spreads negatively predicts borrowers' future stock returns. This negative risk-return relation is separate from previously documented asset pricing...

This paper examines the impact of terrorism on economic growth and capital formation using data for 152 countries from 1970 to 2003.During the past thirty-five years, the world has witnessed nearly twenty thousand terrorist incidents. The increasingly global scope of terrorism has raised...

This paper documents novel evidence that private debt contains value-relevant nonpublic information with significant economic value. We extract banks' private information from term loan spreads. Abnormal loan spreads significantly predict firms' future operating performance and uncertainty...

China's banking industry has grown rapidly over the past three decades. As the major source of funding for Chinese enterprises (especially state-owned enterprises), the banking sector has helped finance the nation's transformation from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented economy. In...

This paper consists of four short pieces on the subprime mortgage market. Based upon a proprietary database, LoanPerformance, of 80 million mortgage loans originated from January 1999 to July 2007, these pieces demonstrate: (1) the subprime loan market has contributed to a net gain in...