Publications

How should price indices account for durable goods like housing, which are debt-financed, held for years, and resold?  The U.S. Consumer Price Index equates owner costs with rental costs, which often diverge dramatically from the one-period user cost of...

We use data on stock portfolios of Norwegian households to show that stock market wealth increases entrepreneurship by relaxing financial constraints. Our research design isolates idiosyncratic variation in household-level stock market returns. An...

We evaluate the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Combining reduced-form estimates from tax data with a global investment model, we estimate responses, identify parameters, and conduct counterfactuals. Domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change...

Economists have widely varying opinions of how corporate taxation affects aggregate investment, output, and wages. This disagreement reflects a 60-year history of mis-application of the neoclassical theory of investment to interpret empirical work and...

We assess the business provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest corporate tax cut in US history. We draw five lessons. First, corporate tax revenue fell by 40 percent due to the lower rate and more generous expensing. Second, firms with...

With ``2020 hindsight,'' the 2000s housing cycle is not a boom-bust but a boom-bust-rebound. Using a spatial equilibrium regression in which house prices are determined by income, amenities, urbanization, and supply, we show that long-run city-level...

The Greek economy experienced a boom until 2007, followed by a decade-long collapse with magnitude and persistence that have no precedent among modern developed economies. We assess quantitatively the sources of the boom and bust and the role of policies...

We document the importance of covenant violations in transmitting bank health to nonfinancial firms using a new supervisory data set of bank loans. Roughly one-third of loans in our data breach a covenant during the 2008-09 period, providing lenders the...

We use supervisory loan-level data to document that small firms (SMEs) obtain shorter maturity credit lines than large firms; have less active maturity management; post more collateral; have higher utilization rates; and pay higher spreads. We rationalize...

We model automatic trigger policies for unemployment insurance by simulating a weekly panel of individual labor market histories, grouped by state.  We reach three conclusions: (i) policies designed to trigger immediately at the onset of a recession...