With free cash flows, borrowers can accumulate cash or voluntarily pay down debts. However, sometimes creditors impose a mandatory repayment covenant called "excess cash flow sweep" in loan contracts to force borrowers to repay debts ahead of schedule. About 17 percent of borrowers in the...

This paper studies the steady state and dynamic consequences of inflation in an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy. It is found that 10 percentage points of inflation entails a steady state welfare cost as high as 13 percent of annual consumption. This...

In this paper, the authors empirically assess the extent to which early release inefficiency and definitional change affect prediction precision. In particular, they carry out a series of ex-ante prediction experiments in order to examine: the marginal predictive content of the revision process,...

The authors show that standard alternative assumptions about the currency in which firms price export goods are virtually inconsequential for the properties of aggregate variables, other than the terms of trade, in a quantitative open-economy model. This result is in contrast to a large...

This paper estimates the value of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) subsidy. Using data from the merger boom of 1991-2004, the authors find that banking organizations were willing to pay an added premium for mergers that would put them over the asset sizes that are commonly viewed as the thresholds for...

This paper develops tests for comparing the accuracy of predictive densities derived from (possibly misspecified) diffusion models. In particular, the authors first outline a simple simulation-based framework for constructing predictive densities for one-factor and stochastic volatility models....

Participants in student loan programs must repay loans in full regardless of whether they complete college. But many students who take out a loan do not earn a degree (the dropout rate among college students is between 33 to 50 percent). The authors examine whether insurance against...

This paper investigates the extent to which technology and uncertainty contribute to fluctuations in real exchange rates. Using a structural VAR and bilateral exchange rates, the author finds that neutral technology shocks are important contributors to the dynamics of real exchange rates....

This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how influence within the group affects internal capital allocations and lending behavior at the member bank level. The group consists of 181 member banks that jointly own a headquarters. Influence is measured by the divergence...

Worker flows and job flows behave differently over the business cycle. The authors investigate the sources of the differences by studying quantitative properties of a multiple-worker version of the search/matching model that features endogenous job separation and intra-firm wage bargaining....