Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 198.
(refine search)
Journal Article
Inventories and the business cycle: an overview
A review of research on the relationship between inventory investment and business cycle fluctuations, focusing on the developments of the last 15 years. A central issue in the literature, the relative importance of demand and supply shocks as sources of fluctuations, continues to be debated.
Journal Article
Theories of loan commitments: a literature review
A loan commitment is an agreement by which a bank promises to lend to a customer at prespecified terms while retaining the right to renege on its promise if the borrower's creditworthiness deteriorates. The contract also specifies the various fees that must be paid over the life of the commitment. Loan commitments are widely used in the economy. As their use has spread, a rich literature has evolved to explain why they exist, how they are priced, and how they affect the risk of the bank and the deposit insurer. This article summarizes what we have learned on these issues. Its main insight is ...
Journal Article
Will electricity deregulation push inflation lower?
Deregulation of electricity generation will offer consumers many advantages, including dramatically lower energy costs. From a macroeconomic viewpoint, electricity purchases are interesting because they are a major component of consumers? budgets (and thus of the CPI) and a large factor of production for many companies. This raises the possibility that electricity deregulation could create a substantial shock to the overall price trend, comparable to other recent energy shocks. The benefits to consumers and producers identified in this article strongly support legislative efforts to increase ...
Journal Article
Identifying amenity and productivity cities using wage and rent differentials
An explanation of how regional wage and rent differentials can be used to classify metropolitan areas according to their amenity and productivity characteristics.
Journal Article
Thrifts and the competitive analysis of bank mergers
An examination of the competitive importance of thrift institutions in supplying financial services to local commercial customers. Based on empirical findings, a method is presented to adjust the market share of loan associations.
Journal Article
Depositor-preference laws and the cost of debt capital
Under depositor-preference laws, depositors' claims on the assets of failed depository institutions are senior to unsecured general-creditor claims. As a result, depositor preference changes the capital structure of banks and thrifts, thereby affecting the cost of capital for depositories. Depositor preference has no impact on the total value of banks and thrifts, however, unless deposit insurance is mispriced.
Journal Article
Sharing with a risk-neutral agent
In the standard solution to the principal?agent problem, a risk-neutral agent bears all the risk. The author shows that, in fact, multiple solutions exist, and often the risk-neutral agent is not the sole bearer of risk. As risk aversion approaches zero, the unique risk-averse solution converges to the risk-neutral solution, wherein the agent bears the least amount of risk. Even a small degree of risk aversion can result in agents bearing significantly less risk than the standard solution suggests.
Journal Article
The Third Industrial Revolution
The author examines periods of rapid technological change for coincidences of widening inequality and slowing productivity growth. He contends that while the introduction of technologies offers profits to investors and premiums for skilled workers, in the long run the rising tide of technological change lifts everybody's boat.
Journal Article
Does intervention explain the forward discount puzzle?
An investigation of the impact of U.S. and German central-bank interventions on the forward discount puzzle for two exchange rates-the German mark/U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen/U.S. dollar-using official 1985-91 data. The evidence on the importance of intervention is strongest for the DM/$. However, the direction of the impact is inconsistent with the findings of Flood and Rose (1996) if periods of intervention are viewed as equivalent to fixed-rate regimes.
Journal Article
Vagueness, credibility, and government policy
A discussion of the reasons why it may be in a government agency's--and society's--best interest to be vague about policy objectives. Using the concept of "cheap talk," the author explains that when an agency faces a trade-off between precise and credible announcements, its best move may be to provide truthful but limited information.