This article explores the aggregate effects of women's empowerment on intra- and intertemporal household choices within a Bewley-style heterogeneous agent framework to aggregate household level decisions into macroeconomic variables. Emphasis is placed on the role of attitudes towards risk and...

Using data of households approaching retirement in the U.S., I find that the Whites' median saving rates are 9 percentage points larger than the Mexican Americans' rates (ethnic gap) and than the African Americans' rates (racial gap). Two-thirds of each gap correspond to changes in asset prices...

In the USA, the share of household wealth held by the richest 1% increased from 23.5% in 1980 to 41.8% in 2012. This paper contributes to understanding the causes behind this increase. First, using an accounting decomposition, I show that more than half of the increase in the share of the top 1%...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the boom and bust in house prices as well as the shifts in the distribution of wealth during the years around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing market using shocks to aggregate income, the distribution...

Wealthier individuals have stronger incentives to seek higher returns. We investigate theoretically the effect this has on long-run wealth inequality. Incorporating capital management into a standard RamseyCass-Koopmans model generates substantial long-run inequality: the majority of the...

We use twenty-five years of tax records for the Norwegian population to study the mobility of wealth over people's lifetimes. We find considerable wealth mobility over the life cycle. To understand the underlying mobility patterns, we group individuals with similar wealth rank histories using...

The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was a loan modification program introduced in 2009, in the U.S., to assist highly indebted homeowners with avoiding foreclosure. This program also encouraged private lenders to offer more sustainable modifications. This paper studies the role of...

Shared-appreciation mortgage (SAM) contracts, which display payments indexed to a local house price, have been proposed as an alternative to alleviate the costs of recessions. Using a heterogeneous agent model with two types of agents (Borrowers and Savers), uninsurable idiosyncratic income...

We construct a theoretical model of labor markets with human capital accumulation to understand and quantify the earnings losses for young workers generated by unemployment: unemployment represents time forgone in terms of human capital accumulation, which adversely affects long-term income...