We provide new, time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We exploit systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles to instrument for house prices. Our main findings are that: 1) Large housing wealth effects are not new: we estimate...

Should the generosity of unemployment benefits and the progressivity of income taxes depend on the presence of business cycles? This paper proposes a tractable model where there is a role for social insurance against uninsurable shocks to income and unemployment, as well as inefficient business...

We present a simple model with income risk and borrowing constraints which yields a "discounted Euler equation." This feature of the model mutes the extent to which news about far future real interest rates (i.e., forward guidance) affects current outcomes. We show that this simple model...

In recent years, central banks have increasingly turned to "forward guidance" as a central tool of monetary policy, especially as interest rates around the world have hit the zero lower bound. Standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance is extremely powerful: promises about...

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures how effective they are. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete-markets model of consumption and inequality with the new...

This paper shows how the empirical implications of incomplete markets models can be assessed using the same full-information methods that are commonly used for representative agent models. It then asks what features of the microeconomic insurance arrangement are important for understanding the...