Commentaries

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Senior Fellows/Fellows, 2020, Pandemic

What is the best mix of cash and credit assistance to combat the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, and what are the principles that should guide those choices? For policymakers to be able to design effective and affordable policies and avoid unintended consequences, it is essential tha...
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

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Senior Fellows/Fellows

We create a newspaper-based Equity Market Volatility (EMV) tracker that moves with the VIX and with the realized volatility of returns on the S&P 500. Parsing the underlying text, we find that 72 percent of EMV articles discuss the Macroeconomic Outlook, and 44 percent discuss Commodity Markets....
Keywords: stock market, equity returns, volatility, uncertainty, government policy
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

China’s stock market greatly outperformed other national markets during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it did so even before it became evident that early containment efforts would flounder in the United States and many other countries. As to why, one view holds that aggress...
Keywords: stock prices, China, monetary policy, credit easing actions, stock market interventions, coronavirus, COVID-19
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Annual Conference

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Real Estate and Urban Economics

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May 2018

This paper studies the long-term effects of redlining policies that restricted access to credit in urban communities. For empirical identification, we use a regression discontinuity design that exploits boundaries from maps created by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1940. We find that ""r...
Keywords: Redlining, Credit Rationing, Household Finance
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Senior Fellows/Fellows

Because corporate limited liability protects the founder’s personal assets, creditors often require founders of new, small and risky firms to contract around limited liability by pledging their personal assets as collateral for loans to their firms. This makes personal bankruptcy law (PBL) relevan...
Keywords: Personal bankruptcy law, innovation, patents, Cross-country study
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