Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View
We provide new, time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles to instrument for house [...]
Did the Introduction of Fixed-Rate Federal Deposit Insurance Increase Long-Term Bank Risk-Taking?
We investigate whether the introduction of fixed-price U.S. federal deposit insurance in 1933 increased the risk-taking of banks over the succeeding period. We examine 60 financial institutions and find that [...]
Can the Market Multiply and Divide? Non-Proportional Thinking in Financial Markets
Nominal stock prices are arbitrary. Therefore, when evaluating how a piece of news should affect the price of a stock, rational investors should think in percentage rather than dollar terms. [...]
The Real Effects of Debt
At moderate levels, debt improves welfare and enhances growth. But high levels can be damaging. When does debt go from good to bad? We address this question using a new [...]
Impact of Public Sector Assumed Returns on Investment Choices
Does the use of assumed investment returns to value liabilities and calculate required contributions lead public pension plans to invest more in risky assets? The analysis finds that, even after [...]
Deposit Insurance Around the World: A Comprehensive Analysis and Database
This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the [...]
Financial Crises and Liberalisation: Progress or Reversals?
Financial crisis can trigger policy reversals, i.e. they can lead to a process of re- regulation of financial markets. Using a recent comprehensive dataset on financial liberalization across 94 countries [...]
Leverage-Induced Fire Sales and Stock Market Crashes
We provide direct evidence of leverage-induced fire sales contributing to a market crash using account-level trading data for brokerage- and shadow-financed margin accounts during the Chinese stock market crash of [...]
The Cost of Banking Regulation
We use exogenous variation in the degree of restrictions to bank competition across Italian provinces to study both the effects of bank regulation and the impact of deregulation. We find [...]
Macroeconomic Effects of Debt Relief: Consumer Bankruptcy Protections in the Great Recession
This paper argues that the debt forgiveness provided by the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system helped stabilize employment levels during the Great Recession. We document that over this period, states with [...]