We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 8 percentage points, to about one quarter of disposable income. We use household-level data to explain why households are postponing consumption despite rapid income growth. Tracing cohorts over time indicates a virtual...

We investigate the socio-economic determinants of mortgage delinquency in 12 EU countries and observe that income volatility significantly increases the mortgage delinquency risk. This pattern even holds for borrowers with higher-income profiles if volatility in income is high enough. From this...

This paper investigates to what extent the wealth accumulation of immigrants is explained by their degree of assimilation, defined as the immigrants' capacity to become more similar over time to the local people in terms of their norms, values, behaviours, and socioeconomic characteristics. The...

This paper examines the extent to which consumption in Russian households responds to exogenous income shocks. During the time period studied in this paper (1994 – 1998), Russia experienced two major economic crises. Both featured extreme movements in the real ruble-dollar exchange rate. The...

We analyze dynamic interactions between market insurance, the stock of insurable assets and liquid wealth accumulation in a model with non-durable and durable consumption. The stock of the durable is exposed to risk against which households can insure. Since the model does not have a closed form...

We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that...

The existing literature suggests that when the saving decision of two-earner households under risk is analysed, standard results on the existence of precautionary saving no longer apply: precautionary saving is obtained if and only if very stringent conditions hold. This paper shows that when...

This paper shows that the interaction between money growth and staggered nominal contracts gives rise to a long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff.

Europeans have worked less than Americans since the 1970s. In this paper, we quantify the relative importance of the extensive and intensive margins of aggregate hours of market work on the observed differences. Our counterfactual exercises show that the two dimensions of the extensive margin,...