Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

We characterize the product line choice and pricing of a monopolist as the upper envelope of net marginal revenue curves to the individual product demand functions. The equilibrium product varieties to include in a product line are those yielding the highest upper envelope. In a central case...

Many migrations are temporary – a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration. Such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants’ economic behavior, generating possible consequences for...

This paper draws on a natural experiment to identify the relationship between income and trust. We use a unique panel dataset on Russia where GDP experienced an 8 percent drop in 2009. The effect of the crisis had been very uneven among Russian regions because of their differences in industrial...

We present a simple model of sovereign debt crises in which a country chooses its optimal mix of short and long-term debt contracts subject to standard contracting frictions: the country cannot commit to repay its debts nor to a specific path of future debt issues, and contracts cannot be made...

We study a model that integrates productive and socialization efforts with network choice and parental investments. We characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this game. We first show that individuals underinvest in productive and social effort, but that solving only the investment...

Using a dynamic factor model that allows for changes in both the long- run growth rate of output and the volatility of business cycles, we document a significant decline in long-run output growth in the United States. Our evidence supports the view that this slowdown started prior to the Great...

We provide evidence for the effects of changes in transport costs, international trade exposure, and input-output linkages on the geographical concentration of Canadian manufacturing industries. Increasing transport costs, stronger import competition, and the spreading out of upstream suppliers...

We study a model of managerial incentive problems where a manager chooses the first two moments of his firm's profit distribution - mean and volatility - along an efficient frontier. Assuming that managers differ with respect to their marginal cost of effort and their risk aversion we explore...