Can government spending have a large effect on private consumption and income? This paper uses a novel dataset on federal government disaster-relief spending, combined with both household and state-level consumption, income and employment data, to answer this question. My estimates show that the...

Well known research based on capitalized income tax data shows robust growth in wealth concentration in the late 2000s. We show that these robust growth estimates rely on an assumption---homogeneous rates of return across the wealth distribution---that is not supported by data. When the...

The U.S. residential housing market collapse illustrates the consequences of ignoring risk while funding mortgage borrowing. Collateral over-valuation was a foundational piece of the crisis. Over the past few decades, secondary markets, securitization, policy and psychology increased the flow of...

We study the implications of social interactions for financial markets in which investors exhibit different degrees of sophistication and can influence each other's beliefs through their interaction. We show that social interactions can either increase or decrease the likelihood for a financial...

In the present paper it will be pointed out with a panel data econometric model that government debt puts banking sector at stake since the volume of not performing loans goes up. The estimation of the model is made feasible through the Eviews software package. The present paper is based on...

This paper uses micro data from four OECD countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands), to assess the determinants of household debt holding and to investigate whether or not credit constraints are important for household debt holding. We extend the existing literature in...

One suggested hypothesis for the dramatic rise in household borrowing that preceded the financial crisis is that low-income households increased their demand for credit to finance higher consumption expenditures in order to keep up with higherincome households. Using household level data on debt...

This paper uses the newly constructed Luxembourg Wealth Study data to document cross-country variation in homeownership rates and the homeownership-income inequality among young households in Finland, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US, and relate it to cross-country differences in mortgage...

The reallocation of mortgage debt to low-income or marginally qualified borrowers plays a central role in many explanations of the early 2000s housing boom. We show that such a reallocation never occurred, as the distribution of mortgage debt with respect to income changed little even as the...