This testimony makes three main points. First, income volatility, especially when it involves income declines, imposes significant hardships on American families. It heightens stress about finances and may increase household living expenses. These hardships are most pronounced for middle-and...

This paper investigates the direct theoretical relationship between the variance of stock returns (σ2E) and financial leverage (L) considering both corporate and personal taxes. Using a dataset of U.S. industrial firms, we examine the variance of stock returns as a function of the firm’s...

Firm volatilities co-move strongly over time, and their common factor is the dispersion of the economy-wide firm size distribution. In the cross section, smaller firms and firms with a more concentrated customer base display higher volatility. Network effects are essential to explaining the...

Firm volatilities co-move strongly over time, and their common factor is the dispersion of the economy-wide firm size distribution. In the cross section, smaller firms and firms with a more concentrated customer base display higher volatility. Network effects are essential to explaining the...

We propose an aggregate growth index that explicitly accounts for non-normality in the micro-economic distribution of firm growth rates and for the presence of a negative scaling relation between their volatility and the size of the firm. Using Compustat data on US publicly traded company, we...