Using data from the U.S. Decennial Census and the National Longitudinal Surveys, we find little evidence of differences in the return to schooling across racial and ethnic groups, even with attempts to control for ability and measurement error biases. While our point estimates are relatively...

In some industries, firms are able to choose who regulates them. There is a long debate over whether regulatory competition is beneficial or whether it leads to a race for the bottom. We introduce another possible issue with regulation. Regulators may take actions intended to minimize the effort...

Large commercial banking firms are monitored by specialized private sector monitors and by specialized government examiners. Previous research suggests that bank exams produce little useful information that is not already reflected in market prices. In this article, we apply a new research...

Seemingly short-term labor market shocks, such as job displacements, can have persistent effects on workers’ earnings, employment, job stability, consumption, and access to health insurance. A long literature suggests such changes in workers’ socioeconomic conditions can have potentially...

This paper proposes a framework to examine the comovements of asset prices with seemingly unrelated fundamentals, as an outcome of the optimal portfolio strategies of large institutional fund managers. In emerging markets, the dominant presence of dedicated fund managers whose compensation is...

Shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment are the most important drivers of business cycle fluctuations in US output and hours. Moreover, these disturbances drive prices higher in expansions, like a textbook demand shock. We reach these conclusions by estimating a DSGE model with several...

Much concern has recently been expressed that both large, procyclical changes in bank assets and "credit crunches" caused by bank reluctance to expand loans during recessions contribute to economic instability. These effects are difficult to explain using the standard textbook model of deposit...

This paper investigates the issue of geographic concentration for the auto supplier industry by means of a large plant-level data set representing information for the year 1997. The industry continues to be highly spatially concentrated, even though its core region has changed over the last few...

This paper develops a simple model of the decision to write a will prior to death and tests the implications of the model using data from Ireland prior to the advent of state provided old age support. The model assumes that individuals write wills in order to change the distribution of their...