We prove that a preference relation which is continuous on every straight line has a utility representation if its domain is a convex subset of a finite dimensional vector space. Our condition on the domain of a preference relation is stronger than Eilenberg (1941) and Debreu (1959, 1964), but...

Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on...

This paper provides the first rigorous assessment of the homeownership experiences of subprime borrowers. We consider homeowners who used subprime mortgages to buy their homes, and estimate how often these borrowers end up in foreclosure. In order to evaluate these issues, we analyze...

In this note we discuss the findings in Piskorski, Seru, and Vig (2010), as well as the authors´; interpretation of their results. First, we find that small changes to the set of covariates used by PSV significantly reduce the magnitude of the differences in foreclosure rates between...

Obesity is significantly more prevalent among non-Hispanic African-American (henceforth black) women than among non]Hispanic white American (henceforth gwhiteh) women. These differences have persisted without much alteration since the early 1970s, despite substantial increases in the rates of...

Although there has been little economic research on 'ethical consumption' in a general sense, work on its various aspects is growing. This paper reviews economic research on ethical consumption, examining both demand-and supply-side aspects. It is argued that the most promising way to see...

This paper analyzes a boundedly rational decision maker who is uncertain about his preference and faces the following trade-off: adding a good to the choice set has a positive option value but increases the complexity of the choice problem. The increased complexity is modeled as a reduction of...

Inflation expectations are key determinants of economic activity and are central to the current policy debate about whether inflation expectations will remain anchored in the face of recent pandemic-related increases in inflation. This paper explores evidence of inattention by constructing two...

We analyze the impact of shifts in the industrial composition of the economy on the distribution of the frequency of price change and its consequences for the slope of the Phillips curve for the United States. By combining product-level microdata on the frequency of price change with data on...

We document empirical regularities of disaggregated inflation and consumption and study whether multisectoral New Keynesian models can explain them. We focus on higher moments of the inflation and consumption growth distributions as well as on the contemporaneous comovement of these two...