We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner's house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth...

We examine the costs associated with funerals and the effects of funeral spending on household functioning, using data collected in the Agincourt Demographic Surveillance Site in South Africa. We find that large outlays of money at the time of the funeral leave households vulnerable to future...

Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We use the high-frequency response to a predictable income decline as a new test to distinguish between...

Proposition 13, adopted by California voters in 1978, mandates a property tax rate of one percent, requires that properties be assessed at market value at the time of sale, and allows assessments to rise by no more than 2% per year until the next sale. In this paper, we examine how Prop 13 has...

Combining a variety of survey and administrative data, this paper measures the progressivity of taxes and transfers at the U.S. federal level and separately for each state. The findings are as follows. (i) The federal tax and transfer system is progressive. (ii) State and local tax and transfer...