We revisit optimal investment in energy-efficiency, presenting a decision framework built around the agent's wealth and wealth dynamic. An investment rule in the form of a trigger is derived such that the agent invests the first time the energy-carrier price crosses this threshold from below....

The main waves of a pandemic and subsequent disease outbreaks in the following years influence the evolution of the distributions of health and wealth, leading to differences in the ability to mitigate future income shocks. We study consumption smoothing and precautionary behaviour associated...

A criticism of earnings risk models of wealth inequality is that they do not accurately capture individual's earnings risks. I construct a stochastic process that directly determines workers earnings. I use a set of new empirical moments to match moments of earnings changes in the universe of...

We estimate an equilibrium model of housing demand and supply. The model allows us to quantify the distributional effects of leverage regulation on mobility and access to high-quality housing. We match the population of households in Norway in 2010-2018, with demographic and financial...

Drawing on detailed panel data, we find that gifts and inheritances substantially increase households’ private pension savings in accounts which are costly or impossible to withdraw prematurely. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that (a) the average difference in bequest-induced...

In this paper we study the neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic income risk and aggregate risk in which risk sharing is endogenously constrained by one-sided limited commitment. Households can trade a full set of contingent claims that pay off depending on both idiosyncratic and...

Although older generations have substantially more wealth than their recent predecessors did at the same age, younger generations do not. Bringing together UK data on those born between the 1930s and 1980s and a lifecycle model of saving, I quantify whether this is due to changes in preferences...

We develop and estimate a life-cycle consumption savings model in which observed genetic variation is allowed to affect wealth accumulation through several distinct channels. We focus on genetic markers that predict educational attainment, aggregated into a predictive index called a polygenic...

Economic theory does not give clear predictions on the impact of social security wealth on private wealth. While the basic life cycle hypothesis predicts full displacement, many theoretical contributions anticipate only a limited offset. The empirical research on the issue is also not...

We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with...