reference library

We study reward-based crowdfunding campaigns, a new class of dynamic contribution games where consumption is exclusive. Two types of backers participate: buyers want to consume the product while donors just…
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The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the country since 2000, and many observers fear it is displacing low-income populations from their homes and communities. We offer new…
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Why are prices in some sectors increasing dramatically even as economy-wide technology and productivity improves? Education and healthcare are notable examples of sectors seemingly stricken by constantly rising prices. Educational…
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We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel time between a bank’s headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we…
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This paper seeks to refine our understanding of how refinancing a mortgage affects household outcomes. This issue has attracted particular attention in the wake of the Great Recession, however, there…
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In recent years, there has been a growing push towards state legislation that would provide consumers with a “right to repair” their products. Currently 18 states have pending legislation that…
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Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study which types of landlords bear the burden of decreased rental…
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Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate…
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Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would…
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In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent…
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Measuring how rent-controlled landlords change their housing supply in response to rent increases is difficult, because new construction is automatically exempt. This paper explores evictions as a barometer for landlords’…
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This paper studies the country-level reaction of bank credit default swap (“CDS”) spreads and stock prices to bailout announcements in the US and five European countries in October 2008. Bailouts…
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We construct theory-based measures of systemic bank shocks. These measures complement banking crisis indicators employed in many empirical studies, which we show capture (lagged) policy responses to systemic bank shocks….
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We propose a distress measure for national banking systems that incorporates not only banks’ CDS spreads, but also how they interact with the rest of the global financial system via…
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Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy…
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In the U.S., nearly 60% of recently built single-family houses, and 80% of houses in new subdivisions, are part of a homeowners association (HOA). We construct the first near-national map…
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This report presents the Federal Reserve Board’s current assessment of the resilience of the U.S. financial system. By publishing this report, the Board intends to promote public under- standing and…
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In this paper, I employ anonymous New York City yellow taxi records to infer variation in interactions between insiders of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Fed)…
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“The 2017 Edition reflects the following principal developments: Trade Secrets: Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, one of the most momentous changes in the history of trade…
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How do non-practicing entities (“Patent Trolls”) impact innovation and technological progress? Although this question has important implications for industrial policy, little direct evidence about it exists. This paper provides new…
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Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of U.S. states to give nurse practitioners the ability to perform more tasks without the supervision of medical doctors. We…
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All PAs must practice with a collaborating physician; however, state laws dictate the extent of that relationship. This interactive guide provides an overview of PA scope of practice laws by…
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In 2005 the United States spent $6,401 per capita on health care-more than double the per capita spending in the median Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country. Between…
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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is amending its medical regulations to permit full practice authority of three roles of VA advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) when they are acting…
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” Pew Health Professions Commission endorses the need to reform the regulatory system, the general vision articulated by the Taskforce on the future of the system, and the invitation to…
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“The Federation of State Medical Boards (the Federation) is a national non-profit association whose membership includes all medical licensing and disciplinary boards in the United States, and the U.S. territories….
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“This report presents the results of the Basel Committee’s latest Basel III monitoring exercise, based on data as of 30 June 2018. Through a rigorous reporting process, the Committee regularly…
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A century ago, captains of industry and their allies in government launched a social experiment in urban America: the abandonment of mass transit in favor of a new personal technology,…
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While both size and complexity are important for the largest U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs), specific types of complexity and their patterns across banks are not well understood. We introduce…
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This paper provides the first, comprehensive evidence on the question of whether the subsidized flood insurance rates are needed to meet the affordability goal of the National Flood Insurance Program….
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Economic recoveries can be slow, fast, or involve double dips. This paper provides an explanation based on the dynamic interactions between bank lending standards and firm entry selection. In the…
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Most economists differ, not on the causes of the Great Recession, but on their relative importance. They concur, though, on the basic problem, namely human, not market failure. This study…
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Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper…
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On August 11, 2020, the Ninth Circuit handed down its opinion in Federal Trade Commission v. Qualcomm Inc., reversing the district court’s judgment in favor of the FTC. This essay…
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Scholars and policymakers have identified neighborhood activism and participation as a valuable source of policy information and civic engagement. Yet, these venues may be biasing policy discussions in favor of…
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This brief describes a range of state-based regulations or policies that either limit or prohibit dental hygienists from sealing children’s teeth at school, or create financial burdens that work against…
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The role of licensing in driving up healthcare costs has been almost completely ignored. The apparent explanation is that nobody can imagine that there is any alternative. The obvious complexity…
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In the rogues’ gallery of regulatory rent-seeking, copyright and patent laws are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. According to the ingenious and highly effective rhetoric of their beneficiaries and supporters,…
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In any search for policies that slow growth and drive inequality, financial regulation is an obvious place to start. After all, the financial sector was Ground Zero for the worst…
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Zoning ordinances and the like have been endemic in the United States for the better part of a century. These laws have always influenced the location of housing within a…
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No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the…
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Intellectual Property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college…
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“Despite research indicating that health, cost, and quality of care outcomes in midwife-led maternity care are comparable with and in some case preferable to those for patients with physician-led care,…
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Many regulatory agency employees are hired by the firms they regulate, creating a “revolving door” between government and the private sector. We study these transitions using detailed data from the…
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How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? Although disclosure is regarded as essential to the functioning of the patent system, legal scholars have expressed considerable skepticism about…
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With the national unemployment rate running below 4 percent, the possibility that an overheated economy could lead to financial imbalances, which in turn could generate or amplify economic distress, has…
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An overheated economy has the potential to lead to financial imbalances, which in turn could generate or amplify economic distress. In two complementary FEDS notes, we study the link between…
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Competition between firms to invent and patent an idea, or “patent racing,” has been much discussed in theory, but seldom analyzed empirically. This article introduces an empirical way to identify…
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We show that the distribution of combined loan-to-value ratios (CLTVs) for purchase mortgages in the U.S. has been remarkably stable over the last 25 years. But there was a dramatic…
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Between 1998 and 2006, house prices in the United States rose by about 90 percent but subsequently experienced a sharp decline by about a third until 2010. These house‐​price developments…
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Yesterday, the Federal Reserve released the results of the 2018 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR). As described in previous TCH’s posts, the 2018 results were crucially driven by the…
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One of the great advantages of digital content has been that for the last forty years, people have had access to whatever content they want whenever they wanted it. That…
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In recent years, college graduates have found themselves increasingly saddled with student loan debt. Even worse, many of these graduates fall behind on that debt sometimes through no fault of…
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“California has a serious housing shortage. California’s housing costs, consequently, have been rising rapidly for decades. These high housing costs make it difficult for many Californians to find housing that…
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly and countries from around the globe are beginning to articulate national strategies for handling the political ramifications. Powering innovations like driverless cars, autonomous drones,…
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This article uses data from the Current Population Survey to analyze the role of professional certifications and occupational licenses in the U.S. labor market. It discusses the prevalence of these…
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We examine the negative relationship between the rate of growth in credit and the rate of growth in output per worker. Using a panel of 20 countries over 25 years,…
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Banking regulators such as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) can implement policies to address the risk of regulatory capture. The objectives of these policies include reducing…
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The use of nurse practitioners (NPs) in primary care is one way to address growing patient demand and improve care delivery. However, little is known about trends in NP presence…
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As we observe the 18th anniversary of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) and Public Health, it is appropriate to take…
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In canonical models with financial constraints, the possibility of fire sales creates a pecuniary externality that results in ex-ante overinvestment. I show that this result is sensitive to the microfoundations…
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Because of a severe shortage of affordable housing in the United States, an increasing number of low-income households suffer from housing instability. However, little evidence exists as to why they…
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I study the short-run effect of new housing construction on housing affordability using individual address history data. Because most new construction is expensive, its effect on the market for more…
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The economic link between globalization and income distribution has been rigorously studied from the perspectives of the international-trade paradigm. However, the international-trade viewpoint does not address the impact of globalization…
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In this study, we provide a measure of the severity of the 2014-2018 US supervisory stress tests, and examine how that severity measure has evolved. Since the passage of the…
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We present a model in which households facing income and housing-price shocks use long-term mortgages to purchase houses. Interest rates on mortgages reflect the risk of default. The model accounts…
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Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the institution of science and of the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how…
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This study reports estimates of the marginal benefits and costs of increasing the regulatory minimum bank equity-to-asset “leverage ratio” from 4 to 15 percent. Benefits arise from reducing the probability…
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In a recent study, The Perryman Group (TPG), a world-renowned group of economists widely used and respected by industry and government, measured the effect of the AIA and PTAB on…
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Historically, and consistently, direct copyright infringement has been understood to be a strict liability tort. Unfortunately, some recent lower court decisions addressing infringement of copyrighted content on online platforms could…
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We study the resolution of global banks by national regulators. Single-point-of-entry (SPOE) resolution, where loss-absorbing capital is shared across jurisdictions, is efficient but may not be implementable. First, when expected…
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Do information differences across US physicians contribute to treatment disparities? This paper uses a unique new dataset to evaluate how changes in physician access to a decision-relevant drug database affect…
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According to “Schwartz’s conventional wisdom” and what has been called “divine coincidence”, price stability should imply macroeconomic and financial stability. However, in light of the global financial crisis, with monetary…
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“We analyze the role that the launch of new drugs has played in reducing the number of years of life lost (YLL) before 3 different ages (85, 70, and 55)…
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Does owning property influence how individuals engage in the political process? This is a fundamental question in political economy, and a timely one given recent interest in understanding “NIMBYism” and…
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Since the onset of the Great Recession, an explosion of both theoretical and empirical research has investigated how the financial crisis emerged and how it was transmitted to the real…
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Patent law is virtually alone in intellectual property (IP) in punishing independent development. To infringe a copyright or trade secret, defendants must copy the protected IP from the plaintiff, directly…
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Bank failures are generally liquidity as well as solvency events. Whether it is households running on banks or banks running on banks, defunding episodes are full of drama. This theater…
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This paper empirically investigates the link between financial structure and income inequality. Using data for a panel of 97 economies over the period 1989-2012, we find that the relationship is…
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We show that examiner-driven variation in patent rights leads to quantitatively large impacts on several patent outcomes, including patent value, citations, and litigation. Notably, Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) overwhelmingly purchase…
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With the main elements of the G20 reforms agreed and implementation underway, an analysis of the effects of these reforms is becoming possible. To that end, the FSB developed a…
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Among the perks of being a bank is the privilege of holding an account with the central bank. Unavailable to individuals and nonbank businesses, central bank accounts pay higher interest…
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A few academic papers have recently indicated that banks with a greater amount of capital tend to lend more as a result of lower funding costs. This evidence has been…
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This report analyzes the twelve best selling drugs in the United States and reveals that drugmakers file hundreds of patent applications – the vast majority of which are granted –…
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How does neighbors’ income affect individual well-being? Our analysis is based on rich US local data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which contains information on where respondents live…
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A growing body of evidence shows that areas with robust primary care systems tend to have better outcomes and lower per capita costs than areas that rely more on specialists….
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This paper analyzes the relationship between bank lobbying and supervisory decisions of regulators and documents its moral hazard implications. Exploiting bank-level information on the universe of commercial and savings banks…
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We develop a new dynamic equilibrium model with heterogeneous households that captures the most important frictions that arise in housing rental markets and explains the political popularity of affordable housing…
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Domestic patent, copyright and trademark regimes are traditionally justified on an incentive rationale. While international intellectual property agreements are nominally aimed at harnessing global markets to expand incentives, this article…
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Wisconsin issues four different types of credentials, which are: licenses, certificates, registrations, and permits. All types collectively are commonly referred to as credentials. For the purposes of this report, the…
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Since the 2008 financial crisis, banking regulators’ capital enhancement efforts have focused on permitting systemically important financial institutions to issue alternative forms of debt and quasi-debt instruments as a means…
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This note proposes a recalibration of the global systemically important bank holding company (GSIB) capital surcharge that takes into account the impact of the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) – one…
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Howell, Baker, Glyn, and Schmitt (HBGS) challenge the consensus view (the “orthodox” view, as they call it) on the causes of European unemployment trends. Numerous papers in this literature examine…
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These neighborhoods—which we call America’s most diverse, mixed-income neighborhoods—have high levels of racial, ethnic and income diversity. This report identifies, maps and counts the nation’s most diverse mixed-income neighborhoods. In…
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Banks’ ratio of the market value to book value of their equity was close to 1 until the 1990s, then more than doubled during the 1996-2007 period, and fell again…
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This report starts by outlining the lax oversight of nonbank financial companies and the systemic-risk regulatory gaps that existed before the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Next, the report charts the development…
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The decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System is evaluated as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary and financial policy. The role of the Reserve Banks…
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As a consequence of the large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve during its quantitative easing operations that began during the Great Recession in 2008, the Fed’s interest income increased…
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The current reliance on patent monopolies is due to the fact that the system is a surviving legacy of the feudal guild system, it is not the result of economic…
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Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to access forms of political participation likely to…
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