This paper presents evidence that the spread between the marginal product of capital and the return on financial assets is mich higher in poor than in rich countries. A model with costly intermediation is developed. In this economy, individuals choose at each instant whether to work or to...

The financial crisis of 2007-09 began as a local problem in the mortgage finance market in the United States and Europe but, within months, escalated into a general global financial crisis, resulting in collapsing investment not just in developed nations but also in Shanghai, Rio and Mumbai, and...

Structural change involves a broad set of trends: (i) sectoral reallocations, (ii) rich movements of productive activities between home and market, and (iii) an increase in the scale of productive units. After extending these facts, we develop a model to explain them within a unified framework....

We use the Islamic holy month of Ramadan as a natural experiment in fasting and fetal health. In Michigan births 1989-2006, we and prenatal exposure to Ramadan among Arab mothers results in lower birthweight and reduced gestation length. Exposure to Ramadan in the first month of gestation is...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the financial crisis of 2007 - 8. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed indices is...

We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four...

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 need...

Correlations of inflation with the growth rate of money increase when data are averaged over longer time periods. Correlations of inflation with the growth of money also are higher when high-inflation as well as low-inflation countries are included in the analysis. We show that serial...

This paper presents the results of a grounded theory study on the automobile industry aimed at developing a concept of aging workforce management by identifying and constructing its constituting elements. Through an in-depth research investigation, it answers the question of how the challenge of...