Why do so few retirees purchase private annuities? Recent research suggests that bequest motives, precautionary savings motives, and actuarially-unfair pricing can explain the lack of demand for annuities. The degree to which these forces can explain the annuity puzzle depends crucially on...

Using a property-level data set of houses in Los Angeles County, I estimate that 30% of the recent surge in mortgage defaults is attributable to early home-buyers who would not have defaulted had they not borrowed against the rising value of their homes during the boom. I develop and estimate a...

In this paper we estimate a model of general and human capital investment within a partial equilibrium model of search. The estimated model enables us to determine the production technology for both types of human capital and to assess their value in the sense of productivity and welfare of...

We show that firms' idiosyncratic volatility in returns and cash flows obeys a strong factor structure. We find that the stocks of firms with large, negative common idiosyncratic volatility (CIV) factor betas earn high average returns. The CIV beta quintile spread is 6.4% per year. To explain...

We propose a network model of firm volatility in which the customers' growth rate shocks influence the growth rates of their suppliers, larger suppliers have more customers, and the strength of a customer-supplier link depends on the size of the customer firm. Even though all shocks are i.i.d.,...