This paper sets up and computes a stochastic neoclassical growth model where agents face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk and heterogenous discount factors. Households value government purchases which are financed by income taxes. The government cannot commit to future streams of...

This paper quantifies the distributional costs of fiscal uncertainty in a neoclassical stochastic growth environment. We set up an incomplete-market model where heterogeneous households face uninsurable idiosyncratic risks in the processes of labor income and discount factor. Aggregate...

Firms expect certain investment expenditures. Firms realize certain investment expenditures. The difference is an investment surprise. With the help of the IFO Investment Survey for the German manufacturing sector we measure firms' (quantitative) investment expectations and firms’...

This paper uses longitudinal micro data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to document the turnover behavior in the housing market. Fact 1: moves are procyclical. Fact 2: the gross flows into and out of the owner-occupied segment of the housing market are four times larger than the...

real option value effect of time-varying uncertainty.

calibration of these models.

activity.

Recessions are times of increased uncertainty and volatility at the micro level. This widely documented empirical pattern has been interpreted as the effect of uncertainty shocks, mediated by various frictions, on aggregate economic activity. We explore the hypothesis that the causation runs the...

There seems to be a widespread belief among economists, policy-makers, and members of the media that the “confidence” of households and firms is a critical component of the transmission of fiscal policy shocks into economic activity. In this paper we take this proposition to the data. We use...

Are firms' expectations biased? Does it matter? We use micro data on firms' production expectations from the German IFO Business Climate Survey and compare them to realization data from the same survey. We then construct series of quantitative firm-specific expectation errors. We find that...