There are a host of potentially risky behaviors in which youth engage, which have important implications for both their well being as youth and their life prospects. The past decade has seen dramatic shifts in the intensity with which youths pursue these risky activities: for example, youth...

This study uses individual-level longitudinal data from Iceland, a country that experienced a severe economic crisis in 2008 and substantial recovery by 2012, to investigate the extent to which the effects of a recession on health behaviors are lingering or short-lived and to explore...

We examine the first-order internal effects of unemployment on a range of health behaviors during the most recent recession using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Consistent with prior studies based on...

What are the fundamental driving forces of macroeconomic fluctuations? In particular, why do people spend more time working in booms and less in recessions? These are basic questions of macroeconomics. Recent thinking has emphasized technology shifts, preference shifts, and changes in government...

We analyze a model economy with many agents, each with a different productivity level. Agents divide their time between two activities: producing goods with the production-related knowledge they already have, and interacting with others in search of new, productivity-increasing ideas. These...

Consumption and income tend to move together; the correlation of their first differences is about 0.14. In most accounts, the correlation is attributed to the upward slope of the consumption function. When the publicis better off, they consume more. But in the microeconomic theory of the...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and, potentially, shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

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Standard international economic models with life cycle/permanent income consumption behavior predict that international portfolio diversification leads to high bilateral consumption correlations. Thus international consumption correlations have been empirically estimated as a test of...

We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data?...