Job loss translates into large and persistent earnings reductions. Using a large administrative dataset from Germany, I document that this reflects both a reduced employment rate and reduced wages, with the recovery in wages being particularly slow. To account for these facts, I build a search...

This paper characterizes tax and debt dynamics in Ramsey plans for incomplete markets economies that generalize an Aiyagari et al. (2002) economy by allowing a single asset traded by the government to be risky. Long run debt and tax dynamics can be attracted not only to the first-best...

High-speed market connections and information processing improve financial institutions' ability to seize trading opportunities, which raises gains from trade. They also enable fast traders to process information before slow traders, which generates adverse selection. We first analyze trading...

We examine what determines the family income that individuals experience over their adult lives. To this end, we estimate a dynamic model of earnings, marriage, and divorce. The model also includes fertility. We explore the determinants of the earnings over a career of single and married men and...

In this paper we aim to understand the evolution of household portfolios, defined broadly enough to include both human and financial wealth positions, over the life-cycle. A key feature of our approach is to include lumpy initial investments (formal education) and subsequent “on the...

Excessive concentration of aggregate risk can lead to financial fragility and balance sheet recessions, and may create the need for financial regulation. This paper studies the optimal financial regulation scheme, with a focus on the optimal allocation of aggregate risk. I use a standard growth...

I study the optimal choice of investment projects in a continuous-time moral hazard model with multitasking. While in the first best, projects are invariably chosen by the net present value (NPV) criterion, moral hazard introduces a cutoff for project selection which depends on both a project's...

In this paper we explain how easier home financing and higher homeownership rates increase unemployment rates. To this purpose we build a model of job search with liquid wealth accumulation and consumption of housing, that can be rented, bought on credit, or sold. In our model, more relaxed...

We provide the first direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We find that very long-run discount rates are low, much lower than implied by most economic theory. We estimate these discount...

There is a long-standing debate about whether banking panics and other financial crises always have fundamental causes or are sometimes the result of self-fulfilling beliefs. Disagreement on this point would seem to present a serious obstacle to designing policies that promote financial...