We study the mortgage cash flow channel of monetary policy transmission under fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) versus adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) regimes by comparing the United States with primarily long-term FRMs and Spain with primarily ARMs that automatically reset annually. We find a robust...

There are more young adults today with either no credit history or insufficient credit history to be scored by one of the major credit bureaus than there were before the Great Recession−a reality that is likely an unintended outcome of the CARD Act of 2009. In regressions that include a rich...

One of the drawbacks of using household surveys to investigate macroeconomic issues has been a lack of a dataset that contains both adequate household expenditure data and comprehensive household wealth and income data. This paper compares alternative methods of imputing household expenditures...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper considers the mechanism by which changing house values impact U.S. household spending. The results suggest that house values affect consumption by serving as collateral for households to borrow against to smooth their spending. The...

Unemployment rates reached unprecedented levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. The nature of the virus transmission, and the policy interventions enacted in response, however, is such that certain "high risk" occupations suffered more than the "low risk" occupations. This paper exploits the...

This paper exploits the variation in the unemployment rate of different occupations in the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze the response of consumption spending to unemployment risk. We find that earlier in the pandemic, higher unemployment risk did not reduce relative spending....

The life-cycle consumption and permanent income hypotheses predict that if workers face greater likelihood of unemployment in the future that lowers expected future income, they will save more today. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by looking at the expenditure response of workers to the...