In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers' revenue but the [...]
Traditional explanations for why some communities block new housing construction focus on incumbent home owner incentives to block entry. Local resident political ideology may also influence community permitting decisions. This [...]
Using peer-to-peer (P2P) lending as an example, we show that learning by doing plays an important role in alleviating the information asymmetry between market players. Although the P2P platform (Prosper.com) [...]
What is generally agreed is that subprime mortgages disproportionately contributed both to the severity of the crisis and to the size of losses imposed upon the taxpayer. What remains in [...]
Since the credit crunch began in 2007, private sector financing for residential mortgages has been virtually non-existent. At the end of 2010, government-backed organizations-including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the [...]
We study a competitive credit market in which lenders with partial knowledge of loan repayment use one of three decision criteria - maximization of expected utility, maximin, or minimax regret [...]
We examine the pervasive view that “equity is expensive,” which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made [...]
One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing [...]
This paper uses monthly returns from 1802-2010, daily returns from 1885-2010, and intraday returns from 1982-2010 in the United States to show how stock volatility has changed over time. It [...]
The federal government recently placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government chartered, privately owned mortgage finance companies, in conservatorship. These two massive companies are profit driven, but as government-sponsored [...]