This paper evaluates the pros and cons of including private equity fund investments in defined contribution plans. Potential benefits include higher returns and improved diversification as well as a relatively safe method for accessing investments previously only available to institutions and...

What happens on Wall Street matters for Main Street. We use establishment-level data on the employment composition of US public firms to show that the predictive power of aggregate stock returns for aggregate employment comes despite the industrial composition of publicly traded firms differing...

We document what fraction of the housing stock in US cities is affordable to different family types. Rather than looking at what fraction of their income people actually pay in rent in each city, we look at the extent to which the housing stock is affordable using discrete housing expenditure...

We study the impact of widespread adoption of work-from-home (WFH) technology using an equilibrium model where people choose where to live, how to allocate their time between working at home and at the office, and how much space to use in production. A key parameter is the elasticity of...

We show that commercial mortgage borrowers behave opportunistically in order to obtain principal reductions. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a model in which lenders cannot perfectly observe borrowers' use values and renegotiation is costly. We then study the effects of a 2009 IRS...

We use loan level data from the NYC metropolitan area to examine the extent to which lenders attempted to prevent foreclosures with concessionary modifications during the Great Depression. We find no principal forgiveness in the sample and only a handful of concessionary mortgage modifications...

This paper examines the different legal frameworks for mortgage markets in different states, focusing on how and when they came into existence, including the British influence on laws in some of the older states, with a particular emphasis on foreclosures, including judicial vs. non-judicial...

In the U.S. labor market unemployed individuals that are actively looking for work are more than three times as likely to become employed as those individuals that are not actively looking for work and are considered to be out of the labor force (OLF). Yet, on average, every month twice as many...

The user cost of labor captures the hiring wage and the expected effect of the economic conditions at the time of hiring on future wages. In search and matching models, I show that it is the user cost and not the wage that is weighted against the worker's marginal product at the time of hiring;...