The intersection of research and policy on consumer credit often has a Goldilocks feel. Some researchers and policymakers posit that consumer credit markets produce too much credit. Other researchers and policymakers posit that markets produce too little credit. I review theories and evidence on...

This paper examines the impact of political cycle on coalmine accidents in China. The political cycle is formed by the major local meetings of legislative bodies held every year in all provinces of China. This is because the government has a strong incentive to maintain social stability during...

Economic variables are known to move asymmetrically over the business cycle: quickly and sharply during crises, but slowly and gradually during recoveries. Not known is the fact that this asymmetry is stronger in countries with less-developed financial systems. This new fact is documented using...

I study a dynamic economy featuring adverse selection in asset markets. Borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs sell past projects to finance new investment, but asymmetric information creates a lemons problem. I show that this friction is equivalent to a tax on financial transactions. The implicit...

This paper examines the combined effect of asymmetric information and private entrepreneurial risk aversion on investment decisions. The standard optimal debt contract becomes modified by the introduction of insurance and a risk premium that entrepreneurs demand due to the uncertainty of their...

We study a labor market in which principals and agents must search for a trading partner, and agents have private information about the value of a match. We show that competitive pressure can induce agents to lie and over-state the value of the match. This leads to insufficient frictional...

We augment a standard monetary dynamic general equilibrium model to include a Bernanke-Gertler-Gilchrist financial accelerator mechanism. We fit the model to US data, allowing the volatility of cross-sectional idiosyncratic uncertainty to fluctuate over time. We refer to this measure of...

The newsworthiness of an event is partly determined by how unusual it is and this paper investigates the business cycle implications of this fact. Signals that are more likely to be observed after unusual events may increase both uncertainty and disagreement among agents. In a simple business...

Survey respondents strongly disagree about return risks and, increasingly, macroeconomic uncertainty. This may have contributed to higher asset prices through increased use of collateralisation, which allows risk-neutral investors to realise perceived gains from trade. Investors with lower risk...

I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about an idiosyncratic shock to their value of leisure. I consider the mechanism design problem for this economy and describe a computational method to solve it. This is an important contribution of the paper since...