Robo-advisors provide investors with automated portfolio management services, and their growth is unprecedented. They performed less well during the COVID-19 pandemic than they had done during the non-crisis period. That less satisfactory performance was due to the fact that rare disasters are...

Using a nonlinear Bayesian likelihood approach that fully accounts for the lower bound on nominal interest rates, we analyze US post-crisis macroeconomic dynamics and provide reference parameter estimates. We find that despite the attention received in the literature, neither the inclusion of...

This paper compares different solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with rare disasters along the lines of those proposed by Rietz (1988), Barro (2006), Gabaix (2012), and Gourio (2012). DSGE models with rare disasters require...

What determines investors' risk-taking across macroeconomic cycles? Researchers have proposed rational expectations models that introduce countercyclical risk aversion to generate the empirically observed time variation in risk-taking. We test whether systematic deviations from rational...

In the late stages of long bull markets, a popular question arises: What steps can an investor take to mitigate the impact of the inevitable large equity correction? However, hedging equity portfolios is notoriously difficult and expensive. We analyze the performance of different tools that...

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...

We present evidence that shocks to household consumption growth are negatively skewed, persistent, countercyclical, and drive asset prices. We construct a parsimonious model where heterogeneous households have recursive preferences. A single state variable drives the conditional cross-sectional...

I estimate welfare benefits of eliminating idiosyncratic consumption shocks unrelated to the business cycle as 47.3% of household utility and benefits of eliminating idiosyncratic shocks related to the business cycle as 3.4% of utility. Estimates of the former substantially exceed earlier ones...