This paper summarizes the proceedings of the second Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on July 2527, 2006. These conferences are unique in featuring the collaboration of two groups of payments experts the private-sector payments industry...

This paper provides a joint analysis of household stockholding participation, stock location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers, using data from the US Survey of Consumer Finances. Our multivariate choice model matches observed participation rates, conditional and...

We use internationally comparable household-level data for ten euro area economies and the United States to investigate cross-country differences in debt holdings and the potential of debt overhang. U.S. households have the highest prevalence of both collateralized and non-collateralized debt,...

In this paper, we propose a model of endogenous partial insurance and we investigate its implications for macroeconomic outcomes, such as wealth inequality, asset accumulation, interest rate, and consumption smoothing. To this end, we include participation costs to state-contingent asset markets...

"This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of implicit government guarantees of the obligations of government-sponsored enterprises. We construct a model with competitive housing and mortgage markets in which the government provides banks with insurance against aggregate shocks to mortgage...

Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to macroeconomic...

The last 20 years have been marked by a sharp rise in international demand for U.S. reserve assets, or safe stores-of-value. We argue that these trends in international capital flows are likely to be a boon for some (by a lot) but a bane for others (by less). Conversely, a sell-off of foreign...

This paper uses panel data through 2011 to examine evidence of shifts in household balance sheet behavior following the financial crisis and Great Recession. The paper considers evidence of balance sheet repair through debt repayment as well as changes in the composition of households' balance...

1. This research examines the potential impact of the stock market crash of 2008-2009 on U.S. working households. The Great Recession caused financial problems for many households in terms of unemployment, business losses, and decreases in real estate values, but the broadly based decreases in...