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Jel Classification:D62 

Working Paper
The Distributional Effects of COVID-19 and Mitigation Policies

This paper develops a quantitative life cycle model in which economic decisions impact the spread of COVID-19 and, conversely, the virus affects economic decisions. The calibrated model is used to measure the welfare costs of the pandemic across the age, income and wealth distribution and to study the effectiveness of various mitigation policies. In the absence of mitigation, young workers engage in too much economic activity relative to the social optimum, leading to higher rates of infection and death in the aggregate. The paper considers a subsidy-and-tax policy that imposes a tax on ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 400

Working Paper
The Theory of Financial Stability Meets Reality

A large literature at the intersection of economics and finance offers prescriptions for regulating banks to increase financial stability. This literature abstracts from the discretion that accounting standards give banks over financial reporting, creating a gap between the information assumed to be available to regulators in models of optimal regulation and the information available to regulators in reality. We bridge insights from the economics, finance, and accounting literatures to synthesize knowledge about the design and implementation of bank regulation and identify areas where more ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2025-054

Working Paper
Tariffs and Goods-Market Search Frictions

We study uniform tariffs in a general equilibrium dynamic model with search frictions between heterogeneous exporting producers and importing retailers. We analytically characterize unilateral import tariffs that maximize domestic welfare. Search frictions lower these tariffs because of market thickness effects, which reinforce aggregate production nonconvexities. A calibration using 2016 U.S. and Chinese data suggests that optimal U.S. unilateral and Nash equilibrium tariffs with baseline search frictions are 10 ppt. below those in a model with reduced search frictions. Changes in welfare in ...
Working Papers , Paper 25-03

Journal Article
The Trade-Offs of Counterterrorism Policies

This article provides a modern overview of counterterrorism tools and their trade-offs for curbing terrorist attacks and their consequences. Defensive and proactive countermeasures constitute two main classes of counterterror tools deployed by targeted governments. The primary drawback of defensive actions, which make terrorist attacks more costly and less apt to succeed, is attack transference that shifts the mode, venue, or target of attacks to those less protected. In contrast, offensive proactive measures, which confront the terrorists directly, may result in backlash as terrorist ...
Review , Volume 105 , Issue 3 , Pages 177-197

Working Paper
Information and Inequality in the Time of a Pandemic

We introduce two types of agent heterogeneity in a calibrated epidemiological search model. First, some agents cannot afford to stay home to minimize virus exposure. Our results show that poor agents bear most of the epidemic’s health costs. Furthermore, we show that when a larger share of agents fail to change their behavior during the epidemic, a deeper recession is possible. Second, agents develop symptoms heterogeneously. We show that for diseases with a higher share of asymptomatic cases, even when less lethal, health and economic outcomes are worse. Public policies such as testing, ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-25

Working Paper
Unequal Climate Policy in an Unequal World

We study climate policy in an economy with heterogeneous households, two types of goods (clean and dirty), and a climate externality from the dirty good. Using household expenditure and emissions data, we document that low-income households have higher emissions per dollar spent than high-income households, making a carbon tax regressive. We build a model that captures this fact and study climate policies that are neutral with respect to the income distribution. A central feature of these policies is that resource transfers across consumers are ruled out. We show that the constrained optimal ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 427

Report
The Prudential Toolkit with Shadow Banking

Several countries now require banks or money market funds to impose state-contingent costs on short-term creditors to absorb financial stress. We study these requirements as part of the broader prudential toolkit in a model with five key ingredients: banks may face an aggregate stress state with high withdrawals; a fire-sale externality motivates a mix of non-contingent and state-contingent regulation; banks may use shadow technologies to circumvent regulation; parameters of the shadow technologies may be private information; and bailouts may occur. We characterize the optimal policy for ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1142

Working Paper
Pandemic Recessions and Contact Tracing

We study contact tracing in a new macro-epidemiological model in which infected agents may not show any symptoms of the disease and the availability of tests to detect these asymptomatic spreaders of the virus is limited. Contact tracing is a testing strategy aiming at reconstructing the infection chain of newly symptomatic agents. A coordination failure arises as agents fail to internalize that their individual consumption and labor decisions raise the number of traceable contacts to be tested, threatening the viability of the tracing system. The collapse of the tracing system considerably ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2020-31

Discussion Paper
Designing Bank Regulation with Accounting Discretion

Why does the banking industry remain prone to large and costly disruptions despite being so heavily regulated? Is there a need for more regulation, less regulation, or simply different regulation? Our recent Staff Report combines insights from academic research in economics, finance, and accounting to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in designing and implementing bank regulation, as well as opportunities for future exploration. This post focuses on the regulation of bank capital, but the ideas are applicable more broadly.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20251215

Working Paper
Strong Spatial Spillovers Determine Neighborhood Shape and Neighborhood Change

This paper explores how spatial spillovers define neighborhoods and drive neighborhood change through a stylized computable equilibrium model of income-based residential sorting. We find three main results. First, stronger spillovers create larger, more distinct neighborhood clusters even when the spatial scope of externalities is small. Second, spillovers make neighborhoods resistant to small change but also susceptible to rapid shifts between equilibrium states. Third, stronger spillovers concentrate change at cluster boundaries and isolated locations rather than neighborhood interiors. ...
Working Papers , Paper 26-11

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