We revisit the alleged retirement consumption puzzle. According to the life-cycle theory, foreseeable income reductions such as those around retirement should not affect consumption. However, we first recall that given higher leisure endowments after retirement, the theory does predict a fall of...

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher-order risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical...

Motivated by the apparent failure of the credit multiplier mechanism (CM) to deliver amplification in DSGE models, we re-examine its role in business cycles to address the question: is something wrong with the CM? Our answer is no. In coming to this answer we construct a model with reproducible...

House-purchasing decisions and the possibility of existing homeowners to tap into their housing equity depend decisively on prevailing loan-to-value (LTV) ratios in mortgage markets with borrowing constrained households. Utilizing a smooth transition local projection (STLP) approach, I show that...

This paper uses SOEP data to study the distributional effect of intergenerational transfers on the wealth distribution of German households. Similar to most other central European countries, Germany is likely to face a period of increasing aggregate bequest flows. At the same time, there is an...

This article explores the aggregate effects of women's empowerment on intra- and intertemporal household choices within a Bewley-style heterogeneous agent framework to aggregate household level decisions into macroeconomic variables. Emphasis is placed on the role of attitudes towards risk and...

Using data of households approaching retirement in the U.S., I find that the Whites' median saving rates are 9 percentage points larger than the Mexican Americans' rates (ethnic gap) and than the African Americans' rates (racial gap). Two-thirds of each gap correspond to changes in asset prices...

In the USA, the share of household wealth held by the richest 1% increased from 23.5% in 1980 to 41.8% in 2012. This paper contributes to understanding the causes behind this increase. First, using an accounting decomposition, I show that more than half of the increase in the share of the top 1%...

How do labor market reforms affect international competitiveness and net foreign assets? To answer this question, we build a two-region RBC model with labor market frictions, idiosyncratic consumption risk, and limited cross-sectional heterogeneity to establish a direct link between labor market...

This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the boom and bust in house prices as well as the shifts in the distribution of wealth during the years around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing market using shocks to aggregate income, the distribution...