The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the stock wealth effect of consumption exhibits structural change(s) or behaves asymmetrically over business cycles. We first perform a general test of linearity for the behavior of aggregate consumption in response to changes in stock wealth based...

This paper presents a model developed to explain the life-cycle patterns in both homeownership and portfolio allocation, and the relationship between them, using a model of rational agents. Two key innovations are incorporated into this model. First, housing is explicitly modeled as both a...

Mortgages are one-sided contracts under which the borrower may terminate the contract at any time, while the lender must commit to honoring the terms of the contract throughout its life. There are two aspects to this feature of the contract that are modeled in this paper. The first is that the...

This paper examines the effects that capital inflows have on the financial system in a Diamond-Dybvig environment. Here, an adverse-selection problem arises where short-term capital has the incentive to enter the domestic banking system while long-term capital chooses to stay out. Then,...

The events of the 1990s, which led to the collapse of the banking sector in many countries around the world, have renewed the need to devise some preventive policies. However, the success of these preventive measures is contingent on the predictability of the crisis both in nature and extent....

How do the liquidity functions of banks affect investment and growth at different stages of economic development? How do financial fragility and the costs of banking crises evolve with the level of wealth of countries? We analyze these issues using an overlapping generations growth model where...

The goal of this paper is to determine the effects of different social security regimes on job search. A less generous pension system induces higher savings across the life cycle and makes agents wealthier and thus more reluctant to accept low wage offers. On the other hand, as the social...

We study a model with a durable good subject to abrupt, periodic obsolescence, and characterize the optimal purchasing policy. Consumers optimally synchronize new purchases with the arrival of new durable models. Hence, some agents use a "flexible" optimal replacement rule that switches between...

This paper examines the optimal (first-best) fiscal policy in a stochastic representative agent model that exhibits a ``keeping up with the Joneses'' utility function and imperfectly competitive product markets. We find that the optimal labor tax is a constant, whose sign is determined by the...

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...