We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that typically confound analyses of the collateral...

Facing risk, people take precautions by insuring themselves through both formal and informal insurance channels. But are private savings merely an inferior, dominated alterna- tive to formal insurance schemes, or are the two options mutual substitutes? To answer this question, we exploit that a...

We assess the validity of differences in eligibility ages for early and old age pension benefits as instruments for estimating the effect of retirement on cognitive functioning. Because differences in eligibility ages across country and gender are correlated with differences in years of...

Would the value of unemployment insurance fall if more people had a buffer stock of liquid savings? Using quasi-experimental evidence from the unexpected introduction of home equity loans in Denmark, where public unemployment insurance is voluntary, we find that liquidity and insurance are...