In the United States, student debt currently represents the second largest component of consumer debt, just after mortgage loans. Repayment of those loans reduces disposable income early in the borrower's lifecycle, when marginal utility is particularly high, and limits their ability to build a...

There is increasing interest in applying lessons learned from household finance to the design of regulation, both within and across international borders. However, household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial...

We evaluate retirement savings adequacy using a large panel of U.S. workers with a 401(k) account. We model medical expenditures, longevity, investment risk, and the likelihood of withdrawals due to hardship, job separation, and reaching age 59 1/2. Based on their current account balances,...

We model education as an investment in human capital that, like other investments, is appropriately evaluated in a framework that accounts for risk as well as return. In contrast to dominant wage-premia approach to calculating the returns to education, but which implicitly ignores risk, we...

Marginal income taxes may have an insurance effect by decreasing the effective fluctuations of after-tax individual income. By compressing the idiosyncratic component o personal income fluctuations, higher marginal taxes should be negatively correlated with the dispersion of consumption across...

We estimate a dynamic structural banking model to examine the interaction between risk-weighted capital adequacy and unweighted leverage requirements, their differential impact on bank lending, and equity buffer accumulation in excess of regulatory minima. Tighter risk-weighted capital...