This paper studies how and why consumers respond to unexpected, transitory income shocks. In a randomized control trial, I elicit marginal propensities to consume (MPC) out of different hypothetical income shock scenarios, varying the payment mode, the shock size, and the source of income. The...

Real estate markets are subject to dynamic, ever-changing influences from location, amenities and neighborhoods; regulation, zoning and population changes; but also - macroeconomic variables, such as interest rates, inflation and economic cycles. The decision to buy or rent a durable,...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

Excessive household borrowing has been identified as an important determinant of financial crises. Borrower-based macroprudential instruments have been proposed as a possible remedy. In Germany, two instruments have been available to macroprudential supervisors since 2017: a cap on the...

Firms' investment decisions involve analyzing prices, products, technologies, productive capacity and the availability of credit. These and other factors were greatly impacted by the 2009 post-crisis economic environment in Brazil. We measure the after crisis impacts of subsidized credit on the...

The following paper assesses whether current policy environments are appropriate for the emergence of cloud computing technology. In particular, this research uses firm-level data for Germany and the UK to examine the impact of capital incentive programmes (a common policy present in most OECD...

Economists often estimate economic models on data and use the point estimates as a stand-in for the truth when studying the model’s implications for optimal decision-making. This practice ignores model ambiguity, exposes the decision problem to misspecification, and ultimately leads to...

In this paper, the relationship between age and household net worth isexamined. The empirical analysis is based on a time-series of four cross-sections of the Finnish household wealth survey. Two different schemesare employed to identify age, cohort and time effects. Time-of-birth isfound to be...

Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the long-term impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental...

When consuming goods provided by public utilities, such as telecommunication, water, gas or electricity, the predominant payment scheme is pay-later billing. This paper identifies one potential consequence of pay-later schemes, present-biased overconsumption of the respective good, and tests the...