This paper documents the life-cycle patterns of household portfolios in Canada, and investigates several hypotheses about asset accumulation and allocation. Inferences are drawn from the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, with some comparisons to earlier wealth surveys from 1977 and 1984. I find...

This paper documents the life-cycle patterns of household portfolios in Canada, and investigates several hypotheses about asset accumulation and allocation. Inferences are drawn from the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, with some comparisons to earlier wealth surveys from 1977 and 1984. I find...

A major research initiative in finance focuses on the determinants of the cross-sectional and time series properties of asset returns. With that objective in mind, asset pricing models have been developed, starting with the capital asset pricing models of Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965), and...

Earnings are riskier and more unequal for households born in the 1960s and 1980s than for those born in the 1940s. Despite the improvements in financial conditions, younger generations are less likely to be living in their own homes than older generations at the same age. By using a life-cycle...

The goal of this paper is to show that household-level financial distress (FD) varies greatly, meaning there is unequal exposure to macroeconomic risk, and that FD can increase macroeconomic vulnerability. To do this, we first establish three facts: (i) regions in the U.S. vary significantly in...

What determines wealth inequality and mobility and how can the policy maker influence it? This paper quantifies in closed form the bottom and the top (Pareto) tail of the distribution in a continuous-time heterogeneous agent model. Financial market imperfections play a key role, for which...

Today the financial services sector has become highly diversified offering the investor with a wide range of investment avenues. With proper investment strategies and financial planning investor can increase personal wealth which will contribute to higher economic growth. Economic growth is...

Behavioural Finance combines psychology with financial theory to comprehend the associations between markets, emotions, personality and reason. Investors have dissimilar outlook when they choose about investing in a specific avenue. Through appropriate investment strategies and financial...

Home ownership is widely stimulated by policy yet its effects are poorly understood. Exploiting privatization decisions of municipally-owned apartment buildings, we obtain random variation in home ownership for otherwise similar buildings with similar tenants. Granular data on demographics,...

Can inflation cure mortgage debt overhang and mitigate the severity of housing busts? Focusing on the Great Recession, I address this question through the lens of a quantitative macroeconomic model of illiquid housing, endogenous mortgage pricing, and equilibrium default. First, I show that an...