We present new evidence on consumer liquidity constraints and the credit market conditions that might give rise to them. We analyze unique data from a large auto sales company serving the subprime market. Short-term liquidity appears to be a key driver of consumer behavior. Demand increases...

This paper examines the implicit health insurance that households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting multiple sources of variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with a greater financial cost of bankruptcy make higher out-of-pocket medical...

Do women and men behave differently in financial asset markets? Our results from an asset market experiment show a marked gender difference in producing speculative price bubbles. Mixed markets show intermediate values, and a meta-analysis of 35 markets from different studies confirms the...

This paper examines the possibility that a child's years of schooling could increase in the number of siblings, instead of being diminished by competition for parents' resources: if unable to finance the education of their younger children, parents may do so through their older children's labor...

Using over two decades of Survey of Consumer Finances data and a pseudo-panel technique, we measure the impact of the Great Recession on US family wealth relative to the counterfactual of what wealth would have been given wealth accumulation trajectories. Our synthetic cohort-level models find...

We develop a model of households with multiple needs (smoothing shocks, financing investment) and constraints (limited credit, self-control issues) in order to examine the nature of household's financing constraints in a developing country, and the impact of relaxing them. We show that increased...

Using a local randomized experiment that arises from a sharp discontinuity in Disability Insurance (DI) policy in Norway, we provide transparent and credible identification of how financial incentives induce DI recipients to return to work. We find that many DI recipients have considerable...

We quantitatively characterize the optimal mix of progressive income taxes and education subsidies in a model with endogenous human capital formation, borrowing constraints, income risk and incomplete financial markets. In addition to the distortions of labor supply, progressive taxes weaken the...