This policy brief examines the impact of student loan debt on individuals' homeownership status and wealth accumulation, employing a rich set of financial and demographic variables that are not available in many of the existing studies that use credit bureau data. It is important to understand...

In the United States, 15 percent of households change residence in a given year. This result is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on gross flows within and between the two segments of the housing market — renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The gross...

This paper develops and applies a simple graphical approach to portfolio selection that accounts for covariance between asset returns and an investor's labor income. Our graphical approach easily handles income shocks that are partly hedgeable, multiple risky assets, multiple risky assets, many...

Following the experience of the global financial crisis, central banks have been asked to undertake unprecedented responsibilities. Governments and the public appear to have high expectations that monetary policy can provide solutions to problems that do not necessarily fit in the realm of...

It has become customary to estimate the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) with GMM using a large instrument set that includes lags of variables that are ad hoc to the model. Researchers have also conventionally used real unit labor cost (RULC) as the proxy for real marginal cost, even though...

This paper examines the concept of inflation persistence in macroeconomic theory. It begins with a definition of persistence, emphasizing the difference between reduced-form and structural persistence. It then examines a number of empirical measures of reduced-form persistence, considering the...

We compare estimates of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) when the curve is specified in two different ways. In the standard difference equation (DE) form, current inflation is a function of past inflation, expected future inflation, and real marginal costs. The alternative closed form...

We illustrate the importance of placing model-consistent restrictions on expectations in the estimation of forward-looking Euler equations. In two-stage limited-information settings where first-stage estimates are used to proxy for expectations, parameter estimates can differ substantially,...

In their 2010 comment (which we refer to as CS10), Cogley and Sbordone argue that: (1) our estimates are not entirely closed form, and hence are arbitrary; (2) we cannot guarantee that our estimates are valid, while their estimates (Cogley and Sbordone 2008, henceforth CS08) always are; and (3)...