The recently published Household Finance and Consumption Survey has revealed large differences in wealth inequality between the countries of the Euro area. We find a strong negative correlation between wealth inequality and homeownership rates across countries. We use two decomposition methods...

In this paper, we propose a model of endogenous partial insurance and we investigate its implications for macroeconomic outcomes, such as wealth inequality, asset accumulation, interest rate, and consumption smoothing. To this end, we include participation costs to state-contingent asset markets...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used in intermediating the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

We construct a new consumption measure as a residual from the budget constraint. Consumption is that part of income that is not used to increase assets. Our measurement relies on detailed Swedish registry data on the various sources of income and the composition of households' asset portfolio,...

Using detailed micro data at the ZIP code level, this article explores the regional variation in housing market performance to account for the severity of the Great Recession. The granularity of the data, relative to a more traditional analysis at the county level, is useful for evaluating the...

This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twenty years of population data from Norway's administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, in a given cross-section, individuals earn markedly different returns on their assets,...

In this paper, we propose a model of endogenous partial insurance and we investigate its implications for macroeconomic outcomes, such as wealth inequality, asset accumulation, interest rate, and consumption smoothing. To this end, we include participation costs to state-contingent asset markets...

I show that countercyclical earnings dynamics can have quantitatively important effects on saving and portfolio choice decisions over the life cycle. During expansions (recessions) when expected future earnings growth is high (low), households save less (more) and also invest a higher (lower)...

This paper quantifies the extent of heterogeneity in consumption responses to changes in real interest rates and house prices in the four largest economies in the euro area: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We first calibrate a life-cycle incomplete-markets model with a liquid financial asset...