The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (e.g. cash, checking, and saving accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (i.e., assets that carry a transaction cost, such as housing, large durables, or retirement accounts). This portfolio...

We provide new evidence on the the cyclical behavior of household size in the United States from 1979 to 2010. During economic downturns, people live in larger households. This is mostly, but not entirely, driven by young people moving into or delaying departure from the parental home. We assess...

Our investigation reveals four sets of results. First, we find substantial inequality in lifetime earnings, more than double what has been reported in earlier work that relied on much shorter panels and made parametric assumptions. The inequality in lifetime earnings above the median of the...

We propose a novel theory of equilibrium price dispersion in product markets with search frictions. As in Diamond (1971), buyers search for sellers sequentially. In contrast to Diamond (1971), buyers do not meet all sellers with the same probability. Specifically, a fraction of the...

There are two facts about the world that we take as given: First the "law of one price" is false -- one can find many different prices for what appears to be, beyond reasonable doubt, the same good. Second, prices are set in nominal terms and appear, beyond reasonable doubt, to be sticky -- some...