Despite the centrality of credit and debt in the financial lives of Americans, little is known about how U.S. consumers' access and utilization of credit changes in the short and long term, and how these changes are related to changes in U.S. consumers' debt. This paper uses data from the...

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years ofpopulation data from Norway's administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results.First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their...

The life-cycle consumption and permanent income hypotheses predict that if workers face greater likelihood of unemployment in the future that lowers expected future income, they will save more today. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by looking at the expenditure response of workers to the...

The COVID-19 pandemic had posed a dramatic impact on labor markets across Europe. Forceful fiscal responses have prevented an otherwise sharper contraction. Many countries introduced or expanded job-retention schemes to preserve jobs and support households. This paper uses a microsimulation...

U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since 2000, but the causes of these fluctuations are still imperfectly identified. We quantify the relative statistical impact of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, expectations, foreclosures, inequality, and...

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...

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment,...

Japan seems to be turning less Ricardian, a trend set to continue. First, the discount wedge seems to have risen, suggesting that consumers have become more myopic. Second, some evidence points to the possibility that an increasing number of households are liquidity constrained. If these...

We study the mortgage cash flow channel of monetary policy transmission under fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) versus adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) regimes by comparing the United States with primarily long-term FRMs and Spain with primarily ARMs that automatically reset annually. We find a robust...

The paper presents estimates of poverty [extreme poverty PPP$1.9 and PPP$3.2] and consumption inequality in India for each of the years 2004-5 through the pandemic year 2020-21. These estimates include, for the first time, the effect of in-kind food subsides on poverty and inequality. Extreme...