This paper seeks to contribute to the U.S. housing finance reform conversation by providing a critical assessment of the various types of policy proposals that have been offered. There appears to be a broad consensus to maintain explicit government guarantees for certain narrowly defined...

In the wake of the ongoing national mortgage crisis, preventing or mitigating foreclosures and facilitating recovery from the damage they cause have become tremendous challenges for community developers, policymakers, and a wide variety of other actors in cities and metropolitan areas. ; The...

This paper constructs a theory of the coexistence of fixed-term and permanent employment contracts in an environment with ex ante identical workers and employers. Workers under fixed-term contracts can be dismissed at no cost while permanent employees enjoy labor protection. In a labor market...

This paper contributes to a large literature concerned with identifying the source of the widening wage gap between high school and college graduates by providing a comprehensive, multidimensional decomposition of wages across both time and educational status. Data from a multitude of sources...

This paper presents a monetary-theoretic model to study the implications of networks' collection of personal identifying data and data security on each other's incidence and costs of identity theft. To facilitate trade, agents join clubs (networks) that compile and secure data. Too much data...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that play a central role in U.S. residential mortgage markets. In recent years, policymakers became increasingly concerned about the size and risk-taking incentives of these two institutions. In September 2008, the federal...

We examine the relationship between real and financial integration. Real integration is measured by productivities of capital and labor from trade data for 1982 to 1997. Financial integration is measured by the black market exchange rate. We find more evidence of convergence to equality for...

We study the sources of the Great Moderation by estimating a variety of medium-scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models that incorporate regime switches in shock variances and the inflation target. The best-fit model—the one with two regimes in shock variances—gives...

Conventional economic policy models focus only on selected elements of the central bank balance sheet, in particular monetary liabilities and sometimes foreign reserves. The canonical model of an "independent" central bank assumes that it chooses money (or an interest rate) unconstrained by a...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that a positive technology shock leads to a decline in labor inputs. However, the standard real business cycle model fails to account for this empirical regularity. Can the presence of labor market frictions address this problem without otherwise altering the...