Approximately half of credit card holders in the United States regularly carry unpaid credit card debt. These so-called "revolvers" exhibit payment behavior that differs from that of those who repay their entire credit card balance every month. Previous literature has focused on the adoption of...

This paper examines whether rising house prices immediately prior to children entering their college years impacts their intergenerational earnings mobility and/or educational outcomes. Higher house prices provide homeowners, especially liquidity constrained ones, with additional funding to...

U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since 2000, but the causes of these fluctuations are still imperfectly identified. We quantify the relative statistical impact of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, expectations, foreclosures, inequality, and...

Using individual-level credit reports merged with loan-level mortgage data, we estimate how mobility relates to home equity when labor markets are weak or strong. We control for constant individual-specific traits with fixed effects and find that homeowners with negative home equity move to...

This paper examines the effect of minimum wage changes on local aggregate inflation and consumption growth. The paper utilizes variation in state-level minimum wages across locations and finds that minimum wage increases have a relatively modest effect on both city-level inflation and spending...

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...

This paper tests whether heterogeneity of time preferences can explain individual credit behavior. In a field experiment targeting individuals from low-to-moderate income households, we measure individual time preferences through choice experiments, and then match these time preference measures...

Financial institutions provide their customers a variety of unpriced services and cover their costs through interest margins - the interest rates they receive on assets are generally higher than the rates they pay on liabilities. In particular, banks pay below-public-market interest rates on...

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...