Brent Moulton and Nicole Mayerhauser (2015) point out that, for more than 50 years, economists have featured the concept of human capital in their models of labor, growth, productivity, and distribution of income. The authors recommend the addition to the System of National Accounts (SNA) of...

This paper explores the link between the house-price expectations of mortgage lenders and the extent of subprime lending. It argues that bubble conditions in the housing market are likely to spur subprime lending, with favorable price expectations easing the default concerns of lenders and thus...

Rapid house-price depreciation and rising unemployment were the main drivers of the huge increase in mortgage default during the downturn years of 2007 to 2010. However, mortgage default was also partly driven by an increased reliance on alternative mortgage products such as pay-option ARMs and...

This article presents a brief overview of the national income accounts. It summarizes the main parts of accounts and situates them within the efforts of economists to quantify economic activity and economic well-being. The author argues that these statistics are necessarily provisional and...

We provide evidence that transactions accounts help financial intermediaries monitor borrowers by offering lenders a continuous stream of data on borrowers' account balances. This information is most readily available to commercial banks, but other intermediaries, such as finance companies, also...

We show that bank branching tends to mitigate localized market power by broadening the geographic scope of competition among banks. Banking services at peripheral locations will be priced more competitively when those locales are served by branch networks. We develop a theoretical model in...

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, has served as an important tool to foster access to financial services for lower-income communities across the country. This study provides new evidence on the effectiveness of CRA on mortgage lending by focusing on a large number of...

We extend the conventional neoclassical production and growth framework, with its emphasis on total factor productivity as the primary macroeconomic mechanism of innovation, to allow for technical change that affects consumer welfare directly. Our model is based on Lancaster's “New Approach to...

In this paper the author relates the measurement of intangibles to the project of measuring the sources of growth. He focuses on three related and difficult areas of the measurement of national income: the measurement of new goods, the deflation of intangible investment, and the divergence...

We develop an experimental methodology that values “free” digital content through the lens of a production account and is consistent with the framework of the national accounts. We build upon the work in Nakamura, et al. (2016) by combining marketing- and advertising-supported content and...