Interest coverage covenants, which set a maximum ratio of interest payments to earnings, are among the most popular provisions in firm debt contracts. For affected firms, the amount of additional debt that can be issued without violating these covenants is highly sensitive to interest rates....

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, but replace the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student´s t-distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that 1) the...

To what extent did an expansion and contraction of credit drive the 2000s housing boom and bust? The existing literature lacks consensus, with findings ranging from credit having no effect to credit driving most of the house price cycle. We show that the key difference behind these disparate...

What explains stock market behavior in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic? Estimates from a dynamic asset pricing model point to wild fluctuations in the pricing of stock market risk, driven by shifts in risk aversion or sentiment. We find further evidence that the Federal Reserve...

Why do stocks rise and fall? From the beginning of 1989 to the end of 2017, $34 trillion of real equity wealth (2017:Q4 dollars) was created by the U.S. corporate sector. We estimate that 43% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating...

Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with unanticipated lower real rates, households which rely more on financial wealth must see large capital gains to afford the consumption that they planned before the decline...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

We study the transmission of monetary policy through bank securities portfolios using granular supervisory data on U.S. bank securities, hedging positions, and corporate credit. Banks that experienced larger losses on their securities during the 2022-2023 monetary tightening cycle extended less...

When race is not directly observed, regulators and analysts commonly predict it using algorithms based on last name and address. In small business lending--where regulators assess fair lending law compliance using the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) algorithm--we document large...

Proxies for race are commonly used in settings where race cannot be observed directly. In the context of small business lending, we examine the standard race prediction algorithm (BISG), which regulators use to assess compliance with fair lending laws. The algorithm relies on an individual’s...