Sharing risks is one of the essential economic roles of families. The importance of this role increases in the amount of uncertainty that households face in the labor market and in the degree of incompleteness of financial markets. We develop a theory of joint household search in frictional...

We study the impact of capital and labor taxation in an economy where couples bargain over the intrahousehold allocation. We present a life cycle model with heterogeneous individuals and incomplete nancial markets. Drawing from the literature of the collective framework of household behavior, we...

I develop a heterogenous agent life-cycle model that examines the effects of the US personal bankruptcy law on bankruptcy filings and welfare. In addition to facing uncertainty over their labor income, agents also face wealth shocks that stem from unexpected changes in family composition or from...

Every year 400,000 entrepreneurs fail and 60,000 file for personal bankruptcy. The option to declare bankruptcy provides entrepreneurs with insurance against the financial consequences of business failures. However, it comes at the cost of worsened credit market conditions. In this paper, we...

We study optimal debt management and fiscal policy under incomplete nancial markets, assuming a benevolent planner and full commitment. Our aim is to find a simple setup which matches some basic facts of US debt management. In particular, we focus on solving a puzzle concerning why governments...

This paper examines the effects of the Chapter 7 wealth exemption level on welfare, bankruptcy filings, debt, and on asset holdings. I build a heterogeneous agent life cycle model which features uninsurable income and expense shocks. Moreover, households can borrow and save simultaneously. When...

We estimate the structural parameters of a quantitative banking model featuring maturity transformation and endogenous failures in the presence of undiversifiable background risk and regulatory constraints. Pervasive balance sheet cross-sectional heterogeneity can be rationalized with...

Our aim is to provide insights into some basic facts of US government debt management by introducing simple financial frictions in a Ramsey model of fiscal policy. We find that the share of short bonds in total U.S. debt is large, persistent, and highly correlated with total debt. A well known...

Our aim is to provide insights into some basic facts of US government debt management by introducing simple financial frictions in a Ramsey model of fiscal policy. We find that the share of short bonds in total U.S. debt is large, persistent, and highly correlated with total debt. A well known...