The aftermath of the recent recession has seen calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate economic activity. The goal of this paper is to study the effects of wealth redistribution from rich to poor households on consumption and output in the short run. We first...

The 1990's witnessed a historically unprecedented number of personal bankruptcy filings. In response, congressional debate over bankruptcy law has recently led to several proposals aimed at making it more difficult to exempt wealth in bankruptcy. In this paper, I evaluate uniform exemption...

In both the theoretical and empirical literature of finance the relative riskiness of two debt instruments identical in all respects save the likelihood of default on payments of principal and/or interest has generally been measured by the difference between the yields to maturity of the two...

The Sharpe-Linter two parameter Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has been the basis for an extraordinary amount of theoretical and empirical work. As originally developed, the CAPM did not explicitly account for the effects of uncertain inflation on asset prices.

In this essay, senior economist Kartik Athreya identifies systemic risk with the presence of linkages between market participants, where problems for one directly create problems for others. He argues that such situations can arise from the use of contractual arrangements, especially debt that...

Recent evidence suggests that households' access to credit has improved. If households can vary labor supply in response to stochastic productivity shocks, changes in credit markets can be expected to alter not only savings and borrowing behavior, but also labor effort. The purpose of this...

Tertiary education in the U.S. requires large investments that are risky, lumpy, and well-timed. Tertiary education is also heavily subsidized. By making the risk of human capital investment more acceptable, especially to low wealth households, subsidies may increase investment in human capital,...