Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision-making in families) is...

We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial-economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is found to...

This study validates the microeconomic model defining the evolution of personal incomes in the U.S. Because of a large portion of population not reporting any income, any comprehensive modeling of the overall personal income distribution (PID) is complicated. Age-dependent PIDs allow overcoming...

Personal finance and economics are two distinct subjects, with some common characteristics, that require instruction by highly qualified teachers. In an ideal world each would be taught in high school; yet in most high schools in the USA there is not room for both. Today, approximately two...

The relative impacts of the monetised and non-monetised deficit on output and inflation in the United States are assessed using annual data for the 1923-1982 period. With Federal Reserve purchases of government debt serving as a measure of monetisation, the results of Granger causality tests...

After three decades of being relatively constant, the homeownership rate increased over the 1994-2005 period to attain record highs. The objective of this paper is to account for the observed boom in ownership by examining the role played by changes in demographic factors and innovations in the...

The last decade has brought about substantial mortgage innovation and increased refinancing. The objective of this paper is to understand the determinants and implications of mortgage choice in the context of a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets. The equilibrium characterization...