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Jel Classification:D91 

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Risk Preferences at the Time of COVID-19: An Experiment with Professional Traders and Students

We study whether the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted risk preferences, comparing the results of experiments conducted before and during the outbreak. In each experiment, we elicit risk preferences from two sample groups: professional traders and undergraduate students. We find that, on average, risk preferences have remained constant for both pools of participants. Our results suggest that the increases in risk premia observed during the pandemic are not due to changes in risk appetite; rather, they are solely due to a change in beliefs by market participants. The findings of our paper support ...
Staff Reports , Paper 927

Working Paper
Credit, bankruptcy, and aggregate fluctuations

We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data? Yes, it does, but only if we explicitly model recessions as displaying countercyclical earnings risk (i.e., rather than having all households fare slightly worse than normal during recessions, we ensure that more households than normal fare very poorly). Second, does access to credit smooth aggregate ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-31

Working Paper
Preventive vs. Curative Medicine: A Macroeconomic Analysis of Health Care over the Life Cycle

This paper studies differences in health care usage and health outcomes between low- and high-income individuals. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) I find that early in life the rich spend significantly more on health care, whereas from midway through life until very old age the medical spending of the poor dramatically exceeds that of the rich. In addition, low-income individuals are less likely to incur any medical expenditures in a given year, yet, when they do incur medical expenditures, the amounts are more likely to be extreme. To account for these facts, I ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-025

Working Paper
The Age-Time-Cohort Problem and the Identification of Structural Parameters in Life-Cycle Models

A standard approach to estimating structural parameters in life-cycle models imposes sufficient assumptions on the data to identify the ?age profile" of outcomes, then chooses model parameters so that the model's age profile matches this empirical age profile. I show that this approach is both incorrect and unnecessary: incorrect, because it generally produces inconsistent estimators of the structural parameters, and unnecessary, because consistent estimators can be obtained under weaker assumptions. I derive an estimation method that avoids the problems of the standard approach. I ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2017-18

Discussion Paper
Financial management tools and consumer confidence: chase blueprint

On March 10, 2015, the Payment Cards Center hosted a workshop on the development and performance of Blueprint, a set of money management features developed by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Chase) and available with several of Chase?s credit cards. The workshop featured presentations by Thomas O?Donnell, managing director of Chase Consumer and Community Banking Quality, and Florian Egg-Krings, general manager of the Slate and Blueprint portfolios. O?Donnell discussed the development of Blueprint, a process that began during the financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2007?2009. Egg-Krings then ...
Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers , Paper 15-4

Working Paper
Modeling the Revolving Revolution: The Debt Collection Channel

We investigate the role of information technology (IT) in the collection of delinquent consumer debt. We argue that the widespread adoption of IT by the debt collection industry in the 1990s contributed to the observed expansion of unsecured risky lending such as credit cards. Our model stresses the importance of delinquency and private information about borrower solvency. The prevalence of delinquency implies that the costs of debt collection must be borne by lenders to sustain incentives to repay debt. IT mitigates informational asymmetries, allowing lenders to concentrate collection ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-2

Working Paper
What Do LLMs Want?

Large language models (LLMs) are now used for economic reasoning, but their implicit "preferences” are poorly understood. We study LLM preferences as revealed by their choices in simple allocation games and a job-search setting. Most models favor equal splits in dictator-style allocation games, consistent with inequality aversion. Structural estimates recover Fehr–Schmidt parameters that indicate inequality aversion is stronger than in similar experiments with human participants. However, we find these preferences are malleable: reframing (e.g., masking social context) and learned ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 25-19

Working Paper
The Hidden Effects of Algorithmic Recommendations

Algorithms are intended to improve human decisions with data-driven predictions. However, algorithms provide more than just predictions to decision-makers—they often provide explicit recommendations. In this paper, I demonstrate these algorithmic recommendations have significant independent effects on human decisions. I leverage a natural experiment in which algorithmic recommendations were given to bail judges in some cases but not others. Lenient recommendations increased lenient bail decisions by 40% for marginal cases. The results are consistent with algorithmic recommendations making ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 104

Working Paper
Technological progress, the \"user cost of money,\" and the real output of banks

Financial institutions provide their customers a variety of unpriced services and cover their costs through interest margins - the interest rates they receive on assets are generally higher than the rates they pay on liabilities. In particular, banks pay below-public-market interest rates on deposits while charging above-public-market rates on loans. Various authors have suggested that this situation allows one to measure the real quantity of financial services provided without explicit prices as proportional to the real stocks of financial assets held by households. We present a ...
Working Papers , Paper 13-21

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Nakajima, Makoto 9 items

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