U.S. households' debt skyrocketed between 2000 and 2007, but has since been falling. This leveraging and deleveraging cycle cannot be accounted for by the liberalization and subsequent tightening of mortgage credit standards that occurred during the period. We base this conclusion on a...

Recent research indicates that the marked increase in U.S. income inequality over the last twenty-five years has not been matched by a similar increase in consumption inequality. This paper examines the role of saving/dissaving in a house as a vehicle for consumption smoothing. Data from the...

n an infinite horizon optimal control problem, the Hamiltonian vanishes at the infinite horizon, when the differential equation is autonomous. The integrand in the integral criterion may contain the time explicitly, but it has to satisfy certain integrability conditions. A generalization of...

Piecewise deterministic control problems are problems involving stochastic disturbance of a special type. In certain situations, in an otherwise deterministic control system, it may happen that the state jumps at certain stochastic points of time. Examples are sudden oil finds, or sudden...

Debit cards are overtaking credit cards as the most prevalent form of electronic payment at the point of sale, yet the determinants of a ubiquitous consumer choice - debit or credit? - have received relatively little scrutiny. Several stylized facts suggest that debit-card use is driven by...

Using credit report records and data collected from several household surveys, we analyze changes in household debt and saving during the 2007 recession. We find that, while different segments of the population were affected in distinct ways, depending on whether they owned a home, whether they...

We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of...

The unemployment gender gap, defined as the difference between female and male unemployment rates, was positive until 1980. This gap virtually disappeared after 1980 - except during recessions, when men's unemployment rates always exceed women's. We study the evolution of these gender...

This paper examines the causes of the observed increase in the average duration of unemployment over the past thirty years. First we analyze whether changes in the demographic composition of the U.S. labor force, particularly the age and gender composition, can explain this increase. We then...

We use Norwegian register data from 1989 to 2002 to estimate the causal effects of programme participation on the transition rate from unemployment to employment,by means of a dependent risks hazard rate model. The separate roles of causality and unobserved heterogeneity are non-parametrically...