macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth …, including new evidence on how borrowing heterogeneity affects the distribution of the opportunity cost of consumption. I also …

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a … housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth before the move. Using Census micro-data, we find that the cross … consumption by about 11 percent. Households at the top end of the covariance distribution who are likely to have owned large homes …

from the 1984 and 1989 waves of the PSID to construct changes in real household wealth as a measure of household saving …This paper examines the empirical link between house price appreciation and the savings behavior of home owners during … the 1980s. The analysis uses household asset and debt data for a sample of under age sixty-five home owning households …

the likelihood of home owning for a mobile household is more than one percentage point higher when the expected house … price covariance rises by 38 percent (one standard deviation). This effect attenuates as a household's probability of moving …

consumption is large and greater than the wealth effect on consumption from stock holdings. Recent theoretical work, in contrast …, argues that changes in housing wealth are offset by changes in housing consumption, meaning that unexpected shocks in housing … wealth should have little effect on non-housing consumption. We reexamine the impact of housing wealth on non …

structural model of savings and endogenous medical spending with heterogeneous agents, and use it to compute the distribution of … medical needs at old ages, and face the greatest consumption risk. Finally, our compensating differential calculations …

economically significant. On average, households with a bequest motive spend about 25 percent less on consumption expenditures. We … conclude that, among the elderly single households in our sample, about four-fifths of their net wealth will be bequeathed and …