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Working Paper
The case of the undying debt
Velde, Francois R. (2009)
The French government currently honors a very unusual debt contract: an annuity that was issued in 1738 and currently yields ?1.20 per year. I tell the story of this unique debt, which serves as an anecdotal but symbolic summary of French public finances since the 18th century.
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-09-12

Working Paper
Platform competition in two-sided markets: the case of payment networks
Chakravorti, Sujit; Roson, Roberto (2004)
In this article, we construct a model to study competing payment networks, where networks offer differentiated products in terms of benefits to consumers and merchants. We study market equilibria for a variety of market structures: duopolistic competition and cartel, symmetric and asymmetric networks, and alternative assumptions about multihoming and consumer preferences. We find that competition unambiguously increases consumer and merchant welfare. We extend this analysis to competition among payment networks providing different payment instruments and find similar results.
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-04-09

Working Paper
Escaping the Great Recession
Melosi, Leonardo; Bianchi, Francesco (2014-08-01)
While high uncertainty is an inherent implication of the economy entering the zero lower bound, deflation is not, because agents are likely to be uncertain about the way policymakers will deal with the large stock of debt arising from a severe recession. We draw this conclusion based on a new-Keynesian model in which the monetary/fiscal policy mix can change over time and zero-lower-bound episodes are recurrent. Given that policymakers? behavior is constrained at the zero lower bound, beliefs about the exit strategy play a key role. Announcing a period of austerity is detrimental in the short ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2014-17

Working Paper
The Bronx is Burning: Urban Disinvestment Effects of the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements
Ellen, Ingrid Gould; Hartley, Daniel; Lin, Jeffrey; You, Wei (2024-12-16)
In response to private insurers’ postwar withdrawal from urban neighborhoods, roughly half of U.S. states developed programs in the late 1960s that offered residual property insurance to property owners denied in the private market. These plans, known as Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans after 1968, inadvertently encouraged moral hazard through underwriting restrictions, risk pooling, and generous payouts. We use a triple-difference design to estimate FAIR’s impact, comparing: (1) pre- and post-FAIR participation periods, (2) neighborhoods likely offered FAIR plans versus ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2024-25

Working Paper
Did adhering to the gold standard reduce the cost of capital?
Chabot, Benjamin; Alquist, Ron (2010)
A commonly cited benefit of the pre-World War One gold standard is that it reduced the cost of international borrowing by signaling a country?s commitment to financial probity. Using a newly constructed data set that consists of more than 55,000 monthly sovereign bond returns, we test if gold-standard adherence was negatively correlated with the cost of capital. Conditional on UK risk factors, we find no evidence that the bonds issued by countries off gold earned systematically higher excess returns than the bonds issued by countries on gold. Our results are robust to allowing betas to differ ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2010-13

Working Paper
Optimal Financial Contracting and the Effects of Firm’s Size
Villa, Alessandro; Brusco, Sandro; Lopomo, Giuseppe; Ropero, Eva (2020-07)
We consider the design of the optimal dynamic policy for a firm subject to moral hazard problems. With respect to the existing literature we enrich the model by introducing durable capital with partial irreversibility, which makes the size of the firm a state variable. This allows us to analyze the role of firm’s size, separately from age and financial structure. We show that a higher level of capital decreases the probability of liquidation and increases the future size of the firm. Althoughanalytical results are not available, we show through simulations that, conditional on size, the ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2024-18

Working Paper
Estimation of a transformation model with truncation, interval observation and time-varying covariates
Hu, Luojia; Honore, Bo E. (2009)
Abrevaya (1999b) considered estimation of a transformation model in the presence of left-truncation. This paper observes that a cross-sectional version of the statistical model considered in Frederiksen, Honor, and Hu (2007) is a generalization of the model considered by Abrevaya (1999b) and the generalized model can be estimated by a pairwise comparison version of one of the estimators in Frederiksen, Honor, and Hu (2007). Specifically, our generalization will allow for discretized observations of the dependent variable and for piecewise constant time- varying explanatory variables.
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-09-16

Working Paper
Dynamic trade liberalization analysis: steady state, transitional and inter-industry effects
Kouparitsas, Michael A. (1998)
Despite their complexity, existing policy evaluation methods ignore many features of the real world that are pertinent for welfare analysis of trade policy. The main limitation of these technics is that they are static, which means they ignore important dynamic consequences of trade liberalization. This paper develops dynamic tools that overcome many of these weaknesses. I apply these technics to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). My analysis suggests that while the steady state gains from NAFTA are significant, the transitional costs associated with moving to the liberalized ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-98-15

Working Paper
Life Insurers’ Private Credit Investments and Annuity Market Share Capture
Meisenzahl, Ralf R.; Polacek, Andy; Overpeck, Jackson (2025-06-30)
We show that life insurers have increased their lending in the private placement market over the past decade, totaling $849 billion, or 14%, on life insurers’ balance sheets in 2024. A substantial part of the growth stems from private credit extension to financial borrowers and to privately placed asset-backed securities. We document that private equity-owned (PE-owned) life insurers drive these trends. We also provide evidence that these investments have about 80 basis points higher spreads compared to public bonds and foster PE-owned insurers’ growth in the annuities market. A one ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2025-09

Working Paper
Charity and the bequests motive: evidence from seventeenth century wills
McGranahan, Leslie (1998)
This paper researches the motivations for charitable bequests by looking at gifts to the poor in the wills of 1357 testators who died in Suffolk, England in the 1620's and 1630's. I find that wealth, religiosity, and the presence of family and friends influence testator generosity. The finding that wealthier, more religious individuals, and those with fewer children give more to the poor support an altruistic model of testator utility. However, the finding that individuals who give to more people outside of their immediate families are more likely to give to the poor contradicts the simple ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-98-25

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