I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Financial inclusion or access to financial services is a major development goal for all nations across the globe. The concept has a multitude of dimensions from payments and savings accounts, credit, insurance and pensions and securities market. Ensuring quality access to formal financial...

In this paper, I study the role of housing for wealth accumulation and the determination of the equilibrium real interest rate within a continuous-time overlapping generations model that incorporates a realistic demographic structure and households that save for life-cycle and bequest reasons....

It is believed that privatizations substantially contributed to boost stock markets through the 1980s and 1990s. However, trough which channels did that materialize? We test whether privatizations improving households' acquaintance with the risk and return characteristics of stocks through the...

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

Using recently available proprietary panel data, we show that while many (35%) US consumers experience financial distress at some point in the life cycle, most of the events of financial distress are primarily concentrated in a much smaller proportion of consumers in persistent trouble. Roughly...