Using individual-level data on homeowner debt and defaults from 1997 to 2008, we show that borrowing against the increase in home equity by existing homeowners is responsible for a significant fraction of both the sharp rise in U.S. household leverage from 2002 to 2006 and the increase in...

This paper examines the long-term impact of keeping versus losing one's home following a mortgage delinquency in the aftermath of the Great Recession, studying the trajectory of homeownership, consumption, and financial well-being over the subsequent decade. Our research design leverages the...

We evaluate and partially challenge the 'household leverage' view of the Great Recession. In the data, employment and consumption declined more in states where household debt declined more. We study a model where liquidity constraints amplify the response of consumption and employment to changes...

We show that household leverage as of 2006 is a powerful statistical predictor of the severity of the 2007 to 2009 recession across U.S. counties. Counties in the U.S. that experienced a large increase in household leverage from 2002 to 2006 showed a sharp relative decline in durable consumption...

This paper reviews recent developments in macro and finance on the relationship between financial risk and the real economy. We focus on three specific topics: the term structure of uncertainty, time variation - and specifically the long-term decline - in the variance risk premium, and time...

We propose a novel time-series econometric framework to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in real time by combining polling data, economic fundamentals, and political prediction market prices. Our model estimates the joint dynamics of voter preferences across states. Applying our...

How can we use the novel capacities of large language models (LLMs) in empirical research? And how can we do so while accounting for their limitations, which are themselves only poorly understood? We develop an econometric framework to answer this question that distinguishes between two types of...

A common practice in evidence-based decision-making uses estimates of conditional probabilities P(y|x) obtained from research studies to predict outcomes y on the basis of observed covariates x. Given this information, decisions are then based on the predicted outcomes. Researchers commonly...

We partner with a large US payment-processing company to run a 5-year, 10 wave panel survey of incentivized quarterly sales forecasts on over 6,000 firms. We match firm predictions to proprietary revenue data to assess accuracy. We find firms forecast poorly, with issues of inaccuracy,...

Monetary and fiscal policies require coordination to achieve desired macroeconomic outcomes. The literature since Leeper (1991) has focused on two regimes: monetary dominance and fiscal dominance. In both cases, one policy is active while the other is passive and accommodates the former. We...