This paper studies the joint dynamics of real house prices and rents over the past decade. We build a dynamic general equilibrium stochastic life cycle model of housing tenure choice with fully speci?ed markets for homeownership and rental properties, and endogenous house prices and rents....

Using a dynamic equilibrium model of housing tenure choice with fully specified markets for homeownership and rental properties, and endogenous house prices and rents, this paper studies the effect of fundamentals on equilibrium house prices and rents. Lower interest rates, relaxed lending...

This paper quantifies the welfare implications of the U.S. Social Security program during the Great Recession. We find that the average welfare losses due to the Great Recession for agents alive at the time of the shock are notably smaller in an economy with Social Security relative to an...

This paper studies the link between rising income uncertainty and household fertility patterns in an Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett framework augmented to include fertility decisions and infertility risk. Building on Becker and Tomes (1976), I model fertility decisions as sequential, irreversible...

This paper studies the effectiveness of the social security program as an insurance mechanism against unanticipated catastrophic shocks to the household balance sheets. Our framework is an overlapping generations (OLG) life cycle model with uninsurable idiosyncratic earnings risk, lifetime...

Estimates of labor market slack can diverge a great deal depending on how slack is defined. We calculate slack using five different concepts that all focus on a single labor market indicator, the unemployment rate. We show that the estimates all provide useful—but different—information. We...

We estimate a monetary policy rule for the US allowing for possible frequency dependence—i.e., allowing the central bank to respond differently to more persistent innovations than to more transitory innovations, in both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. Our estimation method uses...

This paper quantifies the importance of nonwage job characteristics to workers by estimating a structural on-the-job search model. The model generalizes the standard search framework by allowing workers to search for jobs based on both wages and job-specific nonwage utility flows. Within the...

This paper develops an empirical occupational choice model that corrects for misclassification in occupational choices and measurement error in occupation-specific work experience. The model is used to estimate the extent of measurement error in occupation data and quantify the bias that results...