The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), which addressed strains in the asset-backed securities market, was an unusual crisis facility because it provided loans to a wide range of nonbank financial institutions. Using new, detailed loan-level data, we study whether institutional...

Foreclosure laws govern the rights of borrowers and lenders when borrowers default on mortgages. Many states protect borrowers by imposing restrictions on the foreclosure process; these restrictions, in turn, impose large costs on lenders. Lenders may respond to these higher costs by reducing...

Participants in 401(k) plans are more likely than other workers to list quot;retirementquot; as their main reason for saving, to hold individual retirement accounts and to invest in the stock market. There are two possible reasons for these differences: (1) workers who like to save choose to...

Although households have invested billions in 401(k) accounts, these balances may not be new saving if workers invest money that they would have saved in the program's absence. In this paper, I assess the effect of the 401(k) program on saving by comparing changes in the wealth of 401(k)...

Several U.S. panel surveys measure household wealth. At the same time, many important questions about household wealth accumulation remain somewhat unresolved. We consider whether measurement error on the existing suite of longitudinal surveys hinders their usefulness for addressing these...

This paper examines the wealth of successive birth cohorts in the United States using data from the 1989-2001 Surveys of Consumer Finances. We find that older households (those aged 55-64, 65-74 or 75-84) in 2001 had more wealth than households of similar age in 1989, but that the same was not...