Assets in tax-deferred retirement accounts (TDA) and housing are two major components of household portfolios. In this paper, we develop a life-cycle model to examine the interaction between households' use of TDA and their housing decisions. The model generates life-cycle patterns of home...

How do households respond to unanticipated income shocks? I build and estimate a quantitative model of bounded rationality in which reoptimization is costly. Households respond to windfall income shocks by choosing a finite planning horizon over which to reoptimize. The optimal horizon is...

We study a cross section of carry-trade-generated currency excess returns in terms of their exposure to global fundamental macroeconomic risk. The cross-country high-minuslow (HML) conditional skewness of the unemployment gap - our measure of global macroeconomic uncertainty - is a factor that...

The common-factor hypothesis is one possible explanation for the housing wealth effect. Under this hypothesis, house price appreciation is related to changes in consumption as long as the available proxies for the common driver of housing and non-housing demand are noisy and housing supply is...

Foreign direct investment inflows are positively related to growth across developing countries - but so are savings in excess of investment. I develop an explanation for this well-established puzzle by focusing on the limited availability of consumer credit in developing countries together with...

This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks. The likelihood and magnitude of housing disasters are inferred...

We use internationally comparable household-level data for ten euro area economies and the United States to investigate cross-country differences in debt holdings and the potential of debt overhang. U.S. households have the highest prevalence of both collateralized and non-collateralized debt,...

The impact of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy is a topic of considerable debate. In this paper, we examine the response of U.S. consumers to the 2014-2015 negative oil price shock using representative survey data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We propose a difference-in-difference...

This note studies a form of a utility function of consumption with habit and leisure that (a) is compatible with long-run balanced growth, (b) hits a steady-state observed target for hours worked and (c) is consistent with micro-econometric evidence for the inter-temporal elasticity of...

We document that, across households, the money consumption ratio increases with age and decreases with consumption, and that there has been a large increase in the money consumption ratio during the recent era of very low interest rates. We construct an overlapping generations (OLG) model of...