This paper empirically examines the effect of the use of credit scoring by large banking organizations on small business lending in low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas. Using census tract level data for the southeastern United States, the authors estimate that credit scoring increases small...

Extant models of exchange rate behavior have typically relied on statistical rather than economic considerations. The approach has been to employ a variant of the generalized central limit theorem to develop tests for the models proposed. ; We propose a minimal set of simple economic...

Central banks pay close attention to inflation expectations. In standard models, however, inflation expectations are tied down by the assumption of rational expectations and should be of little independent interest to policy makers. In this paper, the authors relax the assumption of rational...

In this paper we extend the results derived in our earlier work to develop a methodology to employ the maximum-likelihood estimation technique for the pricing of interest rate instruments. In order to price bonds and their derivative assets, researchers must identify a preference parameter in...

The yield curve is shaped by (1) expectations of the future path of short-term interest rates and (2) uncertainty about the path. Uncertainty affects the yield curve through two channels: (1) investors’ attitudes toward risk as reflected in risk premia, and (2) the nonlinear relation between...

This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the joint performance of multivariate forecasts of economic variables. The methodology is illustrated by comparing the rankings of forecasters by the Wall Street Journal with the authors’ alternative rankings. The results show that the...

During the past thirty-five years, energy use as a fraction of output has dropped significantly at both the household and the firm levels. Therefore, we investigate a dynamic stochastic generalized equilibrium model economy's response to an energy price hike for different firm and household...

In this paper we investigate the extent to which insurance companies utilize financial derivatives contracts in the management of risks. The data set we employ allows us to observe the universe of individual insurer transactions for a class of contracts, namely, those normally through of as...

The issue of normalization arises whenever two different values for a vector of unknown parameters imply the identical economic model. A normalization does not just imply a rule for selecting which point, among equivalent ones, to call the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). It also governs the...