We present a life-cycle model in which households can invest in short- or long-term assets to hedge against interest-rate risk. Our model matches important stylized facts. First, the share of long-term assets in households' wealth is hump-shaped over the life-cycle. Within cohorts, it increases...

We provide the first large-sample evidence of foreign influence in US politics, showing that meetings between foreign countries and legislators affect government resource allocation directly for countries and indirectly for firms. To do so, we introduce a comprehensive dataset of date-stamped...

Risk premia are significantly elevated during periods of democratization in a cross-country panel of equity data covering 85 countries over 200 years, despite little evidence of a negative effect on either realized or expected GDP and dividends. This result is explained in an asset pricing model...

More than a quarter of working-age households in the United States do not have sufficient savings to cover their expenditures after a month of unemployment. Recent proposals suggest giving workers early access to a small portion of their future Social Security benefits to finance their...

Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S., based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper revisits this conclusion by incorporating Social Security retirement benefits into measures of wealth...

Sovereign debt yields have declined dramatically over the last half-century. Standard explanations for this decline, including aging populations and increases in asset demand from abroad, encounter difficulties when confronted with the full range of evidence across asset classes. We propose...