Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversity his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

There is longstanding evidence that children raised by single parents are more likely to perform poorly in school and partake in 'deviant' behaviors such as smoking, sex, substance use and crime at young ages. However, as of yet there is not widespread evidence or agreement as to whether or not...

How strong are peer effects on the beliefs and spending decisions of individuals? We use a randomized control study in which treated households are told about either average income or debt of individuals like them to assess how peer effects influence their beliefs and spending. The information...

This paper compares the main findings from the fourth wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for Malta with those for the euro area. This comparative report finds that in 2020 the median Maltese household held more real and financial assets than households in the euro area....

We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call them "functional shocks." We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using "VARs with functional...

Elderly households hold most of their wealth in housing, maintain high levels of wealth throughout retirement, and often leave bequests. The value of their houses are subject to large shocks. To what extent do these shocks affect their savings, consumption, and bequests? Answering this question...

This paper compares the main findings from the third wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for Malta with those for the euro area. This comparative report finds that in 2016 the median Maltese household held more real and financial assets than households in the euro area....

We analyse the decline of household saving rates in the bottom half of the income distribution in Germany since the 2000s, which allowed for only moderately increasing consumption inequality, despite sharply rising income inequality. We combine survey data on household consumption with our own...

We analyse the decline of household saving rates in the bottom half of the income distribution in Germany since the 2000s, which allowed for only moderately increasing consumption inequality, despite sharply rising income inequality. We combine survey data on household consumption with our own...

We analyse the decline of household saving rates in the bottom half of the income distribution in Germany since the 2000s, which allowed for only moderately increasing consumption inequality, despite sharply rising income inequality. We combine survey data on household consumption with our own...