Using miscarriage as an instrument for birth suffers from a censoring problem created by the fact that women wanting the pregnancy to end in an abortion frequently pre-empt an "assigned" miscarriage. I describe evidence that this problem is severe, creates a significant bias in IV estimates, and...

Monetary policy is a blunt instrument with which to smooth aggregate volatility. I demonstrate that there is actually very little correlation between how much real state income responds to monetary policy and to shocks that prompt aggregate smoothing by the Federal Reserve. This mismatch turns...

Building on recent evidence concerning the functioning of internal capital markets in financial conglomerates, we conduct a novel test of the balance-sheet channel of monetary policy. Specifically, we investigate how the response of lending to monetary policy differs across small banks that are...