Do people end up in financial trouble simply because of adverse shocks to income and wealth, or is financial trouble related to persistent differences in financial attitudes and behavior that may be transmitted from generation to generation? We address this question using a new administrative...

Jobs increasingly require good decision-making. Workers are valued not only for how much they can do, but also for their ability to decide what to do. In this paper we develop a theory and measurement paradigm for assessing individual variation in the ability to make good decisions about...

We specify an equilibrium model of car ownership with private information where individuals sell and purchase new and second-hand cars over their life-cycle. Private information induces a transaction cost and distorts the market reducing the value of a car as a savings instrument. We estimate...

We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that typically confound analyses of the collateral...

Earnings risk is central to economic analysis. While this risk is essentially subjective, it is typically inferred from administrative data. Following the lead of Dominitz and Manski, 1997, we introduce a survey instrument to measure subjective earnings risk. We pay particular attention to the...

Despite its centrality in monetary policy, communication is not a focus in social security reform. We investigate the potential for active communication to dissipate apparently widespread public confusion about the future of social security. We implement a simple information treatment in which...

How worker productivity evolves with tenure and experience is central to economics, shaping, for example, life-cycle earnings and the losses from involuntary job separation. Yet, worker-level productivity is hard to identify from observational data. This paper introduces direct measurement of...

We develop a method to identify the individual latent propensity to select into treatment and marginal treatment effects. Identification is achieved with survey data on individuals' subjective expectations of their treatment propensity and of their treatment-contingent outcomes. We use the...

A key contention in economics is the discrepancy between micro and macro elasticities of labor supply with respect to marginal tax rates. We revisit this question, focusing on the role of dynamic returns to effort among top earners. We develop a new model of earnings responses to taxes in the...