More Like this

1. A Macroeconomic Model with Financial Panics

   Gertler, Mark; Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro; Prestipino, Andrea. (January 2020, Review of economic studies)

   This paper incorporates banks and banking panics within a conventional macroeconomic framework to analyze the dynamics of a financial crisis of the kind recently experienced. We are particularly interested in characterizing the sudden and discrete nature of banking panics as well as the circumstances that makes an economy vulnerable to such panics in some instances but not in others. Having a conventional macroeconomic model allows us to study the channels by which the crisis affects real activity both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition to modeling the financial collapse, we also introduce a belief driven credit boom that increases the susceptibility of the economy to a disruptive banking panic. 

   more » « less
2. Bank Types, Inclusivity, and Paycheck Protection Program Lending During COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.1177/08912424231163485  

   Cassell, Mark_K; Schwan, Michael; Schneiberg, Marc (March 2023, Economic Development Quarterly)

   How do differences in bank or lending institution type shape access to credit for small businesses in poor and/or minority communities in the United States? Banking systems are populated by lenders that differ qualitatively in their organizational forms, business models and missions, and that connect—or fail to connect—to small business borrowers and local communities in divergent ways. The authors analyze data on the Paycheck Protection Program and its over 11 million loans made to businesses across the United States to trace how these differences shaped the flow of credit to poor and minority communities. The authors find substantial differences across seven lender types, both in their propensities to avoid or lend to firms in traditionally marginalized communities, and in how much they lend to poor and majority–minority communities relative to their nonpoor and majority White counterparts. From this variety within American banking, the authors identify two potential pathways for more inclusive lending. 

   more » « less
3. Signaling and Discrimination in Collaborative Projects

   https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20211729  

   Onuchic, Paula; Ray, Debraj (January 2023, American Economic Review)

   We study collaborative work in pairs when potential collaborators are motivated by the reputational implications of (joint or solo) projects. In equilibrium, individual collaboration strategies both influence and are influenced by the public assignment of credit for joint work across the two partners. We investigate the fragility of collaboration to small biases in the public’s credit assignment. When collaborators are symmetric, symmetric equilibria are often fragile, and in nonfragile equilibria individuals receive asymmetric collaborative credit based on payoff-irrelevant “identities.” We study payoff distributions across identities within asymmetric equilibria, and compare aggregate welfare across symmetric and asymmetric equilibria. (JEL A11, D82, I23) 

   more » « less
4. Minimum Wages, Efficiency, and Welfare

   https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21466  

   Berger, David; Herkenhoff, Kyle; Mongey, Simon (January 2025, Econometrica)

   Many argue that minimum wages can prevent efficiency losses from monopsony power. We assess this argument in a general equilibrium model of oligopsonistic labor markets with heterogeneous workers and firms. We decompose welfare gains into anefficiencycomponent that captures reductions in monopsony power and aredistributivecomponent that captures the way minimum wages shift resources across people. The minimum wage that maximizes the efficiency component of welfare lies below $8.00 and yields gains worth less than 0.2% of lifetime consumption. When we add back in Utilitarian redistributive motives, the optimal minimum wage is $11 and redistribution accounts for 102.5% of the resulting welfare gains, implying offsetting efficiency losses of −2.5%. The reason a minimum wage struggles to deliver efficiency gains is that with realistic firm productivity dispersion, a minimum wage that eliminates monopsony power at one firm causes severe rationing at another. These results hold under an EITC and progressive labor income taxes calibrated to the U.S. economy. 

   more » « less
5. Detecting Phishing Websites through Deep Reinforcement Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC.2019.10211  

   Chatterjee, Moitrayee; Namin, Akbar-Siami (July 2019, 2019 IEEE 43rd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC))

   Phishing is the simplest form of cybercrime with the objective of baiting people into giving away delicate information such as individually recognizable data, banking and credit card details, or even credentials and passwords. This type of simple yet most effective cyber-attack is usually launched through emails,phone calls, or instant messages. The credential or private data stolen are then used to get access to critical records of the victims and can result in extensive fraud and monetary loss.Hence, sending malicious messages to victims is a stepping stone of the phishing procedure. A phisher usually setups a deceptive website, where the victims are conned into entering credentials and sensitive information. It is therefore important to detect these types of malicious websites before causing any harmful damages to victims. Inspired by the evolving nature of the phishing websites, this paper introduces a novel approach based on deep reinforcement learning to model and detect malicious URLs. The proposed model is capable of adapting to the dynamic behavior of the phishing websites and thus learn the features associated with phishing website detection. 

   more » « less