Only a few rich nations are currently at replacement levels of fertility and many are considerably below. We believe that changes in the status of women are driving fertility change. At low levels of female status, women specialize in household production and fertility is high. In an...

This paper studies the cyclical nature of individual income risk using a confidential dataset from the U.S. Social Security Administration, which contains (uncapped) earnings histories for millions of individuals. The base sample is a nationally representative panel containing 10 percent of all...

The goal of this chapter is to study how, and by how much, household income, wealth, and preference heterogeneity amplify and propagate a macroeconomic shock. We focus on the U.S. Great Recession of 2007-2009 and proceed in two steps. First, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we...

We provide evidence on the nature of the monetary transmission mechanism. To identify policy shocks in a setting with both economic and financial variables, we combine traditional monetary vector autoregression (VAR) analysis with high frequency identification (HFI) of monetary policy shocks. We...

We examine the relationship between the business cycle and poverty for the period from 1960 to 2008 using income data from the Current Population Survey and consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new evidence on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and poverty...

This paper examines the relationship between household balance sheets, consumer purchases, and expectations. We find few robust empirical relationships between balance sheet measures and spending, but we do find that unemployment expectations are robustly correlated with spending. We then...

We measure the causal effects of income and wealth on the demand for private-label products. Prior research suggests that these effects are large and, in particular, that private-label demand rises during recessions. Our empirical analysis is based on a comprehensive household-level transactions...

Earnings dynamics are much richer than typically assumed in macro models with heterogeneous agents. This holds for individual-pre-tax and household-post-tax earnings and across administrative (Social Security Administration) and survey (Panel Study of Income Dynamics) data. We estimate two...

Keynes's “Grandchildren” essay famously predicted both a rapid increase in productivity and a sharp shrinkage of the workweek – to fifteen hours – over the century from 1930. Keynes was right (so far) about output per capita, but wrong about the workweek. The key reason is that he failed...

We document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. Our analysis focuses on the U.S. but also uses data from Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and Norway. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels...