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Journal Article
Developments in Household Liabilities Since the 1990s
The ratio of household liabilities to income increased from the mid 1990s to 2010, driven by an increase in the supply of loans that outpaced loan demand.
Which U.S. Households Have Credit Card Debt?
Households carrying credit card balances tend to be middle income, but the ratio of credit card debt to income is highest among those who earn the least.
Working Paper
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
This paper studies a dispersed information economy in which agents can exert costly attention to learn about an unknown aggregate state of the economy. Under certain conditions, attention and four measures of uncertainty are countercyclical: Agents pay more attention when they expect the economy to be in a bad state, and their reaction generates higher (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) cross-sectional output dispersion, (iii) forecast dispersion about aggregate output, and (iv) subjective uncertainty about aggregate output faced by each agent. All these phenomena are prominent features of ...
Which Households Prefer ARMs vs. Fixed-Rate Mortgages?
Adjustable-rate mortgages appear to be more popular with younger, higher-income households that also have bigger mortgages, according to 2019 data.
How Much Can Households Gain and Lose with Unexpected Inflation?
This analysis looks at how the 2021-22 inflation shock affected households based on their exposure to nominal assets and nominal liabilities.
How Does Human Capital Affect Wealth Inequality?
Accounting for human capital can change the distribution of wealth and some common measures of wealth inequality.
Working Paper
Financial Intermediation and Aggregate Demand: A Sufficient Statistics Approach
We provide a unified framework to study how the financial sector affects the transmission of macroeconomic policies, such as monetary and fiscal policies, and asset purchase programs. Our framework nests models of financial intermediation with various microfoundations and allows for rich household heterogeneity. The financial sector supplies liquidity by issuing liquid assets to finance illiquid capital. The elasticities of liquidity supply with respect to returns are sufficient statistics that summarize how the financial sector determines responses to policy through asset markets. This asset ...
Working Paper
Nominal Maturity Mismatch and the Liquidity Cost of Inflation
We document a liquidity channel through which unexpected inflation generates substantial welfare losses. Household balance sheets are nominal maturity mismatched: nominal liabilities have a longer duration than nominal assets. Due to this mismatch, losses from unexpected inflation are concentrated over short time horizons, while gains are spread out over the longer run. This has negative effects on liquidity-constrained households, who cannot easily borrow against their future gains. We quantify the importance of the liquidity channel and show that, for households in the lower half of the ...
Working Paper
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
I show that economic agents’ attention to macroeconomic events can increase macroeconomic uncertainty during recessions. Agents face uncertainty about the aggregate state of the economy, receive dispersed information about it, and can pay attention to acquire more information. When the economy is in a bad state, agents choose to pay more attention, and their collective response increases three common measures of uncertainty: (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) forecast dispersion about output, and (iii) subjective uncertainty about output. Uncertainty driven by agents’ attention implies ...
Journal Article
Assets and Liabilities of Younger vs. Older Households
The balance sheets of US households have changed over the past seven decades, overall and for different age groups.