Free trade has contributed to a ‘great convergence’ of emerging market countries toward incomes in industrialised nations in recent decades. It is less clear whether free mobility of capital across [...]
This study provides new evidence on the effectiveness of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on small business lending by focusing on a sample of neighborhoods with changed CRA eligibility status [...]
This paper finds that CEO stock options influence the choice, amount, and timing of funds distributed as a buyback. These results support two research expectations–that buybacks impose option-induced agency costs [...]
The more a government spends on social insurance, the less likely households are to fall into debt. Social insurance includes pensions, health care, family allowances and parental leave, job training, [...]
The so-called “shadow banking” system arose over recent decades and achieved full bloom just prior to the recent financial crisis. That system proved unstable. And the shadow banking system was [...]
There are concerns that the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) has impeded small business lending. By increasing the fixed regulatory compliance requirements needed to make business loans and operate a bank, the [...]
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 authors use the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances to document a boom in home ownership and mortgage borrowing among young families in the years leading up to the [...]
I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the last one hundred years. The three main approaches – Survey of Consumer Finances [...]
The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase [...]