This paper quantifies the impact of declining home prices, increasing mortgage credit losses, and the associated reduction in credit supply on real GDP growth. Using a state-level panel analysis, I [...]
This paper summarizes and quantifies past changes in the U.S. commercial banking industry and forecasts what the future may hold. It emphasizes regulatory changes and technical and financial innovations as [...]
Thus it is here that economic history can be useful. For ours is not the first age of large-scale international capital flows, or of virulent international financial crises. We today [...]
The US financial services industry grew from 4.9 percent of GDP in 1980 to 7.9 percent of GDP in 2007. A sizeable portion of the growth can be explained by [...]
The $1.6 trillion that U.S. households borrowed in 2010 through government-backed direct loan and loan guarantee programs—most notably from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the student loan programs, and the [...]
The years 1987 and 1988 saw some dramatic developments in U.S. financial markets. The 1987 stock market crash was followed in 1988 by intense corporate restructuring activity, including a record [...]
Yet there are a number of reasons to think that dividend policy, and dividends more generally, may indeed affect consumption. Most obviously, the popular advice to “consume income, not principal” [...]
The great recession of 2008-9 followed an extraordinary house price bubble. The sluggish was characterized by a very slow recovery of residential investment. Oddly, the extensive revision of macroeconomic models [...]
The great recession of 2008-9 followed an extraordinary house price bubble. The sluggish was characterized by a very slow recovery of residential investment. Oddly, the extensive revision of macroeconomic models [...]
Research on leverage and asset-price fluctuations focuses on the direct effect of lax bank lending enabling financially-constrained investors to take excessive risks. Ignored are unconstrained investors speculating on higher prices [...]