Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its GDP. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts (SNA) is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural resource...

While rising house prices benefit existing homeowners, we document a new channel through which price shocks have intergenerational wealth effects. Using panel data from school zones within a large U.S. school district, we find that higher local house prices lead to improvements in local school...

The natural capital concept is generating broad interest that extends well beyond economists. Economics has a long history of applying capital theory to natural resources. However, measurement of the value of ecosystems has mostly focused on income flows rather than valuing stocks of natural...

This paper shows a significant and causal positive relationship between good institutions and sustainability. While sustainability is measured with the adjusted net saving (ANS) indicator, institutional quality is measured using an average of six dimensions of governance. An instrumental...

Using administrative panel data from Norway, we investigate the development of household labor income, financial wealth and asset holdings over a nine-year period surrounding job loss. Consistent with a simple theoretical model, the data show precautionary saving and a shift toward safer assets...

We identify the causal effect of lump-sum severance payments on non-employment duration in Norway by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at age 50. We find that a severance payment worth 1.2 months' earnings at the median lowers the fraction re-employed after a year by six percentage...

"Search frictions in the labor market help explain the equity premium in the financial market. We embed the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search framework into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with recursive preferences. The model produces a sizeable equity premium of 4.54% per...

Drawing on new empirical analysis of 30 years of structural reforms across the OECD, this paper sheds light on the impact of reforms over time, identifies the horizon over which their full effects materialise, and investigates whether such effects vary with prevailing economic conditions and...

We build a New Keynesian business-cycle model with rich household heterogeneity. A central feature is that matching frictions render labor-market risk countercyclical and endogenous to monetary policy. Our main result is that a majority of households prefer substantial stabilization of...