This paper quantifies the welfare implications of the U.S. Social Security program during the Great Recession. We find that the average welfare losses due to the Great Recession for agents alive at the time of the shock are notably smaller in an economy with Social Security relative to an...

The downturn in economic activity in the U.S. that began in December 2007 (as determined by researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research) has been noticeably deeper and has already lasted considerably longer than the prior two recessions - those beginning in July 1990 and in March...

Dramatic structural changes in the U.S. pension system, along with the impending wave of retiring baby boomers, have given rise to a broad policy discussion of the adequacy of household retirement wealth. We construct a uniquely comprehensive measure of wealth for households aged 51 and older in...

Several U.S. panel surveys measure household wealth. At the same time, many important questions about household wealth accumulation remain somewhat unresolved. We consider whether measurement error on the existing suite of longitudinal surveys hinders their usefulness for addressing these...

Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households' balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on...

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...

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%...

Over the last four decades, the U.S. economy has experienced a few secular trends, each of which may be considered undesirable in some aspects: declining labor share; rising profit share; rising income and wealth inequalities; and rising household sector leverage and associated financial...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

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...