I study the labor market risks associated with being self-employed. I document that the self-employed are subject to larger earnings fluctuations than employees and that they frequently transition into unemployment. Given the self-employed are not eligible to unemployment insurance, I analyze...

Payment services offered by non-banks have flourished in recent years. The author provides an overview of the different kinds of non-bank retail payments schemes currently available in Canada, illustrating each by focusing on a specific example. Current players in the Canadian marketplace...

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval....

We study the exposure of mortgage borrowers in Switzerland to interest rate, income and house price risks and examine how the households' choice of risky mortgages is related to individual interest rate expectations and risk-aversion. Our analysis is based on a unique data set of household...

I show that individuals whose unemployment risk tends to increase more when local home prices fall optimally invest less in owner-occupied housing. Using a unique, Swedish register-based database, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the covariance between individually estimated...

Popular press and some practitioners have warned against threats that buying risky assets pose on agents saving for retirement, children education and other uses. This paper shows that in a standard two-period general equilibrium model where some savers have no risk-sharing motives, there exists...

We investigate the determinants of a household's decision on whether to invest in risky financial assets. Financial theory suggests that with increasing labor income risk, the reluctance of households to hold stocks increases. We propose to measure income risk as the observed variation of...

This paper studies the life cycle consumption-investment-insurance problem of a family. The wage earner faces the risk of a health shock that significantly increases his probability of dying. The family can buy term life insurance with realistic features. In particular, the available contracts...

Assuming a risk-neutral bank and assuming household utility to be exponential, we show how under information symmetry the covariance of income and loan repayments may explain higher household borrowings than in the case without default option. Under ex post information asymmetry and positive...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a few issues related to how best to communicate uncertainty about projections of future pension benefits to members of DC plans, and especially to present a pension risk simulator developed by the Chilean regulator (Superintendencia de Pensiones, SP) that...