We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and...

We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and...

We propose a new classification of consumption goods into nondurable goods, durable goods and a new class which we call "memorable" goods. A good is memorable if a consumer can draw current utility from its past consumption experience through memory. We construct a novel consumption-savings...

Overconfidence is a widely documented phenomenon. Empirical evidence reveal two types of overconfidence in financial markets: investors both overestimate the average rate of return to their assets and underestimate uncertainty associated with the return. This paper explores implications of...

We propose and estimate a model of family job search and wealth accumulation with data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This dataset reveals a very asymmetric labor market for household members who share that their job finding is stimulated by their partners' job...

This paper measures the effect of the ongoing extensions of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on the unemployment rate using a calibrated structural model that features job search and consumption-saving decisions, skill depreciation, UI eligibility, and UI benefit extensions that capture what...

American households have received a triple dose of bad news since the beginning of the current recession: The greatest collapse in asset values since the Great Depression, a sharp tightening in credit availability, and a large increase in unemployment risk. We present measures of the size of...

We use the European Community Household Panel, a harmonized data set covering the countries of the European Union, to provide detailed estimates of the returns to education. Our results can be summarized as follows. Firstly, average returns to education have been mostly stable during the second...

The purpose of this contribution is to illustrate the mechanism by which higher oil prices might lead to lower interest rates in the context of a simple model that takes into account the global external savings equilibrium. The simple model has interesting implications for how one views the huge...

This paper provides a joint analysis of household stockholding participation, stock location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers, using data from the US Survey of Consumer Finances. Our multivariate choice model matches observed participation rates, conditional and...