We study the structure of optimal wedges and wealth taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with endogenous skills. Human capital is a private state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we assume that human capital investment is a)...

Recent empirical research documents that the strong short-term relationship between U.S. monetary aggregates on one side and inflation and real output on the other has mostly disappeared since the early 1980s. Using the direct estimate of flows of USD abroad we find that domestic money (currency...

Recent empirical research has found that the strong short-term relationship between US monetary aggregates and macroeconomic fundamentals, as outlined in the classical study of M. Friedman and Schwartz, mostly disappeared since the early 1980s. In the light of B. Friedman and Kuttner (1992)...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously...

We show that delinquent loans are serviced differently depending on their securitization status. Conditional on a loan becoming seriously delinquent, we find a significantly lower foreclosure rate associated with loans held by the bank (`portfolio' loans) when compared to similar loans that are...

The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable...

The effectiveness of alternative loss functions assigned to the common central bank of a monetary union is studied. The alternative policy objectives are a function of the degree of aggregation of decision variables. We consider, respectively, the policy based on the union-wide aggregates and...