Using the universe of mortgage applications data in the US, we document that since the early 1990s there was a significant decline in the share of mortgages with a co-borrower. The decline, despite being a universal phenomenon across the US, evinced significant spatial heterogeneity and...

We use the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher program as a setting to evaluate the interaction of homeownership and race on the wealth accumulation of low-income households. Using a within-treatment difference-in-differences framework, we establish that...

Rising interest rates can create "mortgage rate lock" for homeowners with fixed rate mortgages, who can hold onto their low rates as long as they stay in their homes but would have to take on new mortgages with higher rates if they moved. We show mobility rates fell in 2022 and 2023 for...

Many young employees work on a temporary basis, which entails significantly greater income risk than "permanent" work, even for jobs in the same occupation and at a similar wage. We find that this income uncertainty leads lenders to ration credit to temporary workers, precisely at the stage of...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

We show that prior lifetime experiences can "scar" consumers. Consumers who have lived through times of high unemployment exhibit persistent pessimism about their future financial situation and spend significantly less, controlling for the standard life-cycle consumption factors, even though...

Older people often express regret about financial decisions made earlier in life that left them susceptible to old-age insecurity. Prior work has explored one outcome, saving regret, or peoples' expressed wish that they had saved more earlier in life. The present paper extends attention to five...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Investors’ return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents’ mental models – their subjective understanding – of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US...