The Dutch bank florin was the dominant currency in Europe during much of the 17th and 18th centuries. The florin, a fiat money, was managed by an early central bank, the Bank of Amsterdam. Using a new reconstruction of the Bank of Amsterdam's balance sheet, we analyze the florin's loss of...

This paper proposes a robust approach to hedging and pricing in the presence of market imperfections such as market incompleteness and frictions. The generality of this framework allows us to conduct an in-depth theoretical analysis of hedging strategies for a wide family of risk measures and...

This paper studies some seemingly anomalous results that arise in possibly misspecified and unidentified linear asset-pricing models estimated by maximum likelihood and one-step generalized method of moments (GMM). Strikingly, when useless factors (that is, factors that are independent of the...

n the U.S. economy during the past 25 years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents, and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight connection...

As a measure of labor market strength, the raw employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) confounds employment outcomes with labor supply behavior. Movement in the EPOP depends on the relative movements of the employment rate (one minus the unemployment rate) and the labor force participation rate....

Empirical analysis often involves using inexact measures of desired predictors. The bias created by the correlation between the problematic regressors and the error term motivates the need for instrumental variables estimation. This paper considers a class of estimators that can be used when...

Using data from the Multinational Time Use Study, this paper documents the trends and levels of time allocation, with a focus on home hours, for a relatively large set of industrialized countries during the past 50 years. Three patterns emerge. First, home hours have decreased in both the United...

The relationship between risk and return is one of the most studied topics in finance. The majority of the literature is based on a linear, parametric relationship between expected returns and conditional volatility. This paper models the contemporaneous relationship between market excess...

This paper examines how the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest investors in subprime private-label mortgage-backed securities (PLS), influenced the risk characteristics and prices of the deals in which they participated. To identify the causal effect...

The analysis in this paper provides estimates of family welfare losses generated by wage and nonlabor income declines experienced across the Great Recession and by labor market constraints existing postrecession. Welfare losses are greater as families (both married and single) move up the income...