During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the US varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. Our message is that household financial health matters for understanding this relationship. Two facts are essential for our finding: (1) the decline in house prices...

During the Great Recession, the collapse of consumption across the U.S. varied greatly but systematically with house-price declines. We find that financial distress among U.S. households amplified the sensitivity of consumption to house-price shocks. We uncover two essential facts: (1) the...

Evidence suggests that human psychology plays a role in individuals' financial decisions, with economically meaningful consequences observed even at the aggregate market level. This chapter considers many instances whereby human mood induced by exogenous factors is associated with economically...

This article addresses the issue concerning the application of Regulation (EU) 1286/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 November 2014 “on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance based investment products (PRIIPs)” in relation to callable corporate...

Is wider access to stockholding opportunities related to reduced wealth inequality, given that it creates challenges for small and less sophisticated investors? Counterfactual analysis is used to study the influence of changes in the US stockholder pool and economic environment, on the...

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in continuous time. My generalized framework accommodates jumps and heterogeneous recursive preferences. I show that countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to risk premia if and only if all...

I review the literature on financial speculation driven by belief disagreements from a macroeconomics perspective. To highlight unifying themes, I develop a stylized macroeconomic model that embeds several mechanisms. With short-selling constraints, speculation can generate overvaluation and...

Changes in credit supply induce large and frequent variations in households' access to unsecured debt. They generate a novel financial precautionary motive, which compounds the classical motive associated with idiosyncratic income risk, as borrowers accumulate risk-free bonds to hedge against...

We examine the relationship between households’ demand for traditional money and the proliferation of alternative financial assets using a cross-section of countries. We have found that the inclusion of the disaggregated indicators of financial assets improves the money demand models. Notably,...

This paper demonstrates that credit reporting -- banks observing households' default histories -- can cause slow recoveries of housing prices and employment from mortgage crises. Comparing credit cycles with and without credit reporting and capturing the impact of mortgage default on employment...