Historical accounts of financial crises suggest that fear and greed are the common denominators of these disruptive events: periods of unchecked greed eventually lead to excessive leverage and unsustainable asset-price levels, and the inevitable collapse results in unbridled fear, which must...

In 2009, the Federal Reserve Board implemented a survey of families that participated in the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to gain detailed information on the effects of the recent recession on all types of households. Using data from the 2007-09 SCF panel, we highlight the variation in...

Our cognitive abilities like memory, perception, self-reflection etc. are highly evolved, but maladapted to the challenges of modern life. In this article the most common flaws of memory are described and it is shown how these flaws of memory might impact our recollection of financial events and...

In examining social responses to crises, including natural disasters, the focus is normally on the performance of economic, political, and social institutions. However, households play a crucial role in crisis response, serving as shock absorbers as crises affect other institutions. In...

We study the impact of debtor distress during a financial crisis on support for a populist far-right party. Our empirical approach exploits variation in exposure to foreign currency household loans during a currency crisis in Hungary. Foreign currency debt exposure leads to a large and...

Did the financial crisis spread from distressed banks to households through a contraction of the credit supply? We study this question with a dataset that contains observations on all accounts in Danish banks as well as comprehensive information about account holders and banks. We show that...

The aim of the paper is to analyze changes in families' assets between 2002 and 2012; to measure changes in the degree of inequality; and to identify which social groups (or classes) have gained from these changes, using the decomposition procedure of the Gini concentration ratio proposed by Dagum...

High levels of subprime consumer debt can create social problems. We test the effects of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) bailouts during the Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 crisis, respectively, on this debt. We use over 11 million credit...