Spatial wage differences other incentives to change the location of work either by commuting or by moving to the new work location. Combining an intensive labor supply margin with an extensive, productivity-enhancing margin of work place change due to commuting or moving, I study how spatial...

Financial markets provide imperfect insurance of labor income risk. However, workers can partly insure against labor market risk by commuting to adjacent regions. Since commuters own wage claims to output produced in adjacent regions, the business cycle in the neighborhood becomes a relevant...

Households in some European countries increased their indebtedness massively over the past 20 years. Besides household debt, also government debt and corporate debt are in some countries at levels not seen before. While there is a common agreement that these high debt levels are not sustainable...

Using individual-level credit reports merged with loan-level mortgage data, we estimate how mobility relates to home equity when labor markets are weak or strong. We control for constant individual-specific traits with fixed effects and find that homeowners with negative home equity move to...

This paper quantifies the local impact of monetary policy through the cash-flow channel during the Crisis by combining novel micro datasets with near-universal coverage of UK mortgages and employment. I estimate that a reduction in mortgage payments equivalent to 1% of household income led to...

Using high-frequency spending data, we show that household consumption displays excess sensitivity to salient macro-economic news, even when the news is not real. When the announced local unemployment rate reaches a 12-month maximum, local news coverage of unemployment increases and local...

We provide evidence of the stock market wealth effect on consumption by using a local labor market analysis and regional heterogeneity in stock market wealth. An increase in local stock wealth driven by aggregate stock prices increases local employment and payroll in nontradable industries and...

Wealth effect estimates between asset classes across studies often cannot be directly compared. To allow for this comparison I construct a new data set on U.S. household asset and debt positions at the county-level to obtain new estimates of wealth effects on local labor market outcomes. I find...

Financial markets provide imperfect insurance of labor income risk. However, workers can partly insure against labor market risk by commuting to adjacent regions. Since commuters own wage claims to output produced in adjacent regions, the business cycle in the neighborhood becomes a relevant...

The Spanish economy is currently plagued by a deep recession with very high unemployment. We ask how much of the unemployment increase in Spain can be traced back to the debt deleveraging needs of Spanish households. We use provincial household debt and sectoral unemployment data and follow Mian...