This paper studies how and why households adjust their spending, saving, and borrowing in response to transitory income shocks. We leverage new large-scale survey data to first quantitatively assess households' intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and deleverage (MPDs) (the...

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...

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...

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...

<i>An older version of this paper is available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w14734.rev0.pdf to NBER subscribers and those in domains eligible for free downloads. Individual purchasers of papers are directed to email orders@nber.org or to call 617 588-1405 to purchase the older version.</i>

This paper uses an open economy DSGE model to explore how trade openness affects the transmission of domestic shocks. For some calibrations, closed and open economies appear dramatically different, reminiscent of the implications of Mundell-Fleming style models. However, we argue such stark...

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...

To what extent does household inequality affect the response of aggregate consumption to aggregate real shocks? We first review two state-of-the-art papers with household heterogeneity and aggregate uncertainty. They teach us that having a larger fraction of poor and borrowing constrained...

We show that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and drive asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences. A single state variable drives the conditional cross-sectional moments of...