Dutch-Caribbean plantations attracted substantial outside funding in the 1760s. This came to an abrupt end after the 1773 credit crisis. We use one banker’s detailed archives to analyze how bankers and investors were initially able to overcome asymmetric information problems, and why the system eventually broke down. Bankers oversaw plantations’ cash flows and placed debt with investors in the form of mortgage-backed securities. Strong growth led to lax screening and an oversupply of credit. After a fall in commodity prices, plantation debts were unsustainable. Restructurings were incomplete and debt overhang led to underinvestment and a drop in economic activity.

This paper uses a Lagrangian approach to provide sufficient conditions under which money burning expenditures are used in an optimal delegation contract. For comparison, we also establish simple sufficient conditions for the optimality of a cap allocation under a restricted set of preferences for a benchmark setting in which money burning is not allowed. We also apply our findings to a model of cooperation and to a model with quadratic preferences and families of distribution functions. In addition, we provide several comparative statics results.

We propose a general and highly efficient method for solving and estimating general equilibrium heterogeneous-agent models with aggregate shocks in discrete time. Our approach relies on the rapid computation and composition of sequence-space Jacobians—the derivatives of perfect-foresight equilibrium mappings between aggregate sequences around the steady state. We provide a fast algorithm for computing Jacobians for heterogeneous agents, a technique to substantially reduce dimensionality, a rapid procedure for likelihood-based estimation, a determinacy condition for the sequence space, and a method to solve nonlinear perfect-foresight transitions. We apply our methods to three canonical heterogeneous-agent models: a neoclassical model, a New Keynesian model with one asset, and a New Keynesian model with two assets.

In the context of interwar Poland, we find that Jews tended to be more literate than non Jews, but show that this finding is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in villages regardless of their religion. The case of interwar Poland illustrates that the Jewish relative education advantage depends on the historical and institutional contexts.

Using millions of historical census records and modern birth certificates, we document that immigrants assimilated into US society at similar rates in the past and present. We measure cultural assimilation as immigrants giving their children less foreign names after spending more time in the United States, and show that immigrants erase about one-half of the naming gap with natives after 20 years both historically and today. Immigrants from poorer countries choose more foreign names upon first arrival in both periods but are among the fastest to shift toward native-sounding names. We find substantial cultural assimilation for immigrants of all education levels.

The U.S. dollar exchange rate clears the global market for dollar-denominated safe assets. We find that shifts in the demand and supply of safe dollar assets are important drivers of variation in the dollar exchange rate, bond yields, and other global financial variables. An increase in the convenience yield that foreign investors derive from holding safe dollar assets causes the dollar to appreciate, and incentivizes foreign debtors to tilt their issuance towards dollar-denominated instruments. U.S. monetary policy also affects the dollar exchange rate through its impact on the supply of safe dollar assets and the convenience yield. Interest rate spreads with foreign countries are not sufficient statistics to gauge the impact of the stance of U.S. monetary policy on currency markets. The U.S. Treasury basis, which measures the yield on an actual U.S. Treasury minus the yield on an equivalent synthetic U.S. Treasury constructed from a foreign bond, provides a direct measure of the global scarcity of dollar safe assets.

Systemic risk arises when shocks lead to states where a disruption in financial intermediation adversely affects the economy and feeds back into further disrupting financial intermediation. We present a macroeconomic model with a financial intermediary sector subject to an equity capital constraint. The novel aspect of our analysis is that the model produces a stochastic steady state distribution for the economy, in which only some of the states correspond to systemic risk states. The model allows us to examine the transition from "normal" states to systemic risk states. We calibrate our model and use it to match the systemic risk apparent during the 2007/2008 financial crisis. We also use the model to compute the conditional probabilities of arriving at a systemic risk state, such as 2007/2008. Finally, we show how the model can be used to conduct a macroeconomic "stress test" linking a stress scenario to the probability of systemic risk states.