Empirical mortgage prepayment models generally have trouble explaining differences in mortgage prepayment speeds among pools with similar interest rates on the underlying mortgages. In this paper, we model some of the sources of termination heterogeneity across mortgage pools, particularly the...

This paper argues that changes in workplace organization, including the usage of self-managed teams, incentive pay, and employee voice, have been a significant component of the turnaround in productivity growth in the United States during the 1990s. Our work goes beyond measuring the impact of...

We investigate the effects of employer-provided health insurance on the labor supply of married women. Because health benefits commonly are restricted to full-time workers, wives who prefer to work short hours but have no alternate source of insurance may work long hours in order to acquire...

This paper investigates the role that imperfect knowledge about the structure of the economy plays in the formation of expectations, macroeconomic dynamics, and the efficient formulation of monetary policy. Economic agents rely on an adaptive learning technology to form expectations and...

This paper examines an agent's choice of forecast method within a standard asset pricing model. To make a conditional forecast, a representative agent may choose one of the following: (1) a rational (or fundamentals-based) forecast that employs knowledge of the stochastic process governing...

Mortgages are one-sided contracts under which the borrower may terminate the contract at any time, while the lender must commit to honoring the terms of the contract throughout its life. There are two aspects to this feature of the contract that are modeled in this paper. The first is that the...

This paper estimates several popular sticky-price New Keynesian models in an effort to understand whether and under what circumstances these models can usefully describe observed outcomes. We estimate and compare specifications that contain different forms of habit formation, specifications that...

Shifts in the long-run rate of productivity growth are difficult, in real time, to distinguish from transitory fluctuations. We analyze the evolution of forecasts of long-run productivity growth during the 1970s and 1990s and examine in a dynamic general equilibrium model the consequences of...

We assess the market microstructure properties of U.S. banking firms' equity, to determine whether they exhibit more or less evidence of asset opaqueness than similar-sized nonbanking firms. The evidence strongly indicates that large banks (traded on NASDAQ) trade much less frequently despite...