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Report
Intergenerational Redistribution in the Great Recession
We construct a stochastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households are subject to aggregate shocks that affect both wages and asset prices. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify how the welfare costs of big recessions are distributed across different household age groups. The model predicts that younger cohorts fare better than older cohorts when the equilibrium decline in asset prices is large relative to the decline in wages. Asset price declines hurt the old, who rely on asset sales to finance consumption, but benefit the young, who purchase ...
Working Paper
Beliefs, Aggregate Risk, and the U.S. Housing Boom
Endogenously optimistic beliefs about future house prices can account for the increase, time-path, and volatility of house prices in the U.S. housing boom of the 2000s without shocks to housing preferences. In a general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and aggregate risk, heterogeneous agents endogenously form beliefs about future house prices in response to shocks to fundamentals. When fundamentals like credit conditions loosen, agents can only partially revise up their beliefs, resulting in increasingly optimistic beliefs that are consistent with both novel and existing empirical ...