Staff Working Papers
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No Double Standards: Quantifying the Impact of Standard Harmonization on Trade
Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting. -
The Simple Economics of Global Fuel Consumption
This paper presents a structural framework of the global oil market that relies on information on global fuel consumption to identify flow demand for oil. We show that under mild identifying assumptions, data on global fuel consumption help to provide comparatively sharp insights on elasticities and other key structural parameters of the global oil market. -
Exchange Rates, Retailers, and Importing: Theory and Firm-Level Evidence
We develop a model with firm heterogeneity in importing and cross-border shopping among consumers. Exchange-rate appreciations lower the cost of imported goods, but also lead to more cross-border shopping; hence, the net impact on aggregate retail prices and sales is ambiguous. -
The Intergenerational Correlation of Employment: Is There a Role for Work Culture?
We document a substantial positive correlation of employment status between mothers and their children in the United States, linking data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults. After controlling for ability, education and wealth, a one-year increase in a mother’s employment is associated with six weeks more employment of her child on average. -
Explaining the Interplay Between Merchant Acceptance and Consumer Adoption in Two-Sided Markets for Payment Methods
Recent consumer and merchant surveys show a decrease in the use of cash at point-of-sale (POS). Increasingly, consumers and merchants have access to a growing array of payment innovations as substitutes for cash. -
Financial Frictions, Durable Goods and Monetary Policy
Financial frictions affect how much consumers spend on durable and non-durable goods. Borrowers can face both loan-to-value (LTV) constraints and payment-to-income (PTI) constraints. -
Resolving Failed Banks: Uncertainty, Multiple Bidding & Auction Design
Bank resolution is costly. In the United States, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) typically resolves failing banks by auction. -
Flight from Safety: How a Change to the Deposit Insurance Limit Affects Households’ Portfolio Allocation
Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper. -
Tail Index Estimation: Quantile-Driven Threshold Selection
The most extreme events, such as economic crises, are rare but often have a great impact. It is difficult to precisely determine the likelihood of such events because the sample is small. -
Are Long-Horizon Expectations (De-)Stabilizing? Theory and Experiments
Most models in finance assume that agents make trading plans over the infinite future. We consider instead that they are boundedly rational and may only form forecasts over a limited horizon.