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Journal Article
Household Inequality and the Consumption Response to Aggregate Real Shocks
The drop in output and consumption that occurred during the Great Recession has been large and prolonged. Figure 1 displays per capita U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) between 1985 and 2016 and highlights the large drop in both consumption and output that occurred starting in 2007 and its parallel shift compared with the previous trend. In this article, we ask why consumption has dropped so much and has been recovering so slowly. We also ask to what extent household inequality before and after the Great Recession interacted with the recession ...
Journal Article
Comparing patterns of default among prime and subprime mortgages
This article compares default patterns among prime and subprime mortgages, analyzes the factors correlated with default, and examines how forecasts of defaults are affected by alternative assumptions about trends in home prices. The authors find that extremely pessimistic forecasts of home price appreciation could have generated predictions of subprime defaults that were closer to the actual default experience for loans originated in 2006 and 2007. However, for prime loans one would have also had to anticipate that defaults would become much more sensitive to home prices.
Conference Paper
Expectations of risk and return among household investors: Are their Sharpe ratios countercyclical?
Data obtained from special questions on the Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes are used to analyze stock market beliefs and portfolio choices of household investors. We find that expected risk and return are strongly influenced by economic prospects. When investors believe macroeconomic conditions are more expansionary, they tend to expect both higher returns and lower volatility. This implies that household Sharpe ratios are procyclical, which is inconsistent with the view that stock market returns should compensate investors for exposure to macroeconomic risks. The finding of procyclical ...
Working Paper
Policy Intervention in Debt Renegotiation: Evidence from the Home Affordable Modification Program
The main rationale for policy intervention in debt renegotiation is to enhance such activity when foreclosures are perceived to be inefficiently high. We examine the ability of the government to influence debt renegotiation by empirically evaluating the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries (servicers) with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. A difference-in-difference strategy that exploits variation in program eligibility criteria reveals that the program generated an overall increase in the intensity of ...
Working Paper
Precautionary savings motives and tax efficiency of household portfolios: an empirical analysis
Tax efficiency is the dominant consideration in theoretical portfolio models that allow for both taxable and tax-deferred accounts (TDAs). Investors are advised to locate higher-tax assets in their tax-deferred accounts, which in the Unites States commonly translates into "holding bonds inside TDAs and holding equities outside." Yet, observed portfolio allocations are not tax efficient. This paper empirically evaluates the predictions of a recent model designed to bridge the existing gap by explicitly incorporating uninsurable labor income risk and limited accessibility of TDA assets in ...
Newsletter
Mortgage Refinancing during the Great Recession: The Role of Credit Scores
This article examines whether deteriorating credit scores may have posed a barrier to mortgage refinancing during the Great Recession of 2008?09 and its immediate aftermath. The authors find that in general, as long as borrowers kept up with their mortgage payments, their credit scores did not fall significantly over this period. Hence, credit scores are not likely to explain why certain borrowers with sufficient home equity did not refinance their mortgages.
Working Paper
From the horse's mouth: gauging conditional expected stock returns from investor surveys
We use data obtained from a series of Michigan Surveys of Consumer Attitudes to study stock market beliefs and portfolio choices of individual investors. We find that expected returns over the medium- and long-term horizon appear to be extrapolated from past realized returns. The findings also indicate that a more optimistic assessment of macroeconomic conditions coincides with higher expected returns and lower expected volatility, implying strongly procyclical Sharpe ratios. These results are given added credence by the empirical finding that reported portfolio concentrations in equities ...
Working Paper
How did the 2003 dividend tax cut affect stock prices?
We test the hypothesis that the 2003 dividend tax cut boosted U.S. stock prices and thus lowered the cost of equity. Using an event-study methodology, we attempt to identify an aggregate stock market effect by comparing the behavior of U.S. common stock prices to that of European stocks and real estate investment trusts. We also examine the relative cross-sectional response of stock prices for high-dividend and low-dividend stocks. We find that U.S. large-cap and small-cap indexes do not outperform their European counterparts, nor REIT stocks, over the event windows, suggesting the absence of ...
Conference Paper
Transforming payment choices by doubling fees on the Illinois Tollway
On January 1, 2005, Illinois doubled the highway toll for travelers paying with cash, but kept the price unchanged for those paying electronically. This paper combines a theoretical model of payment choice with empirical analysis based on this rare natural experiment of differential pricing depending on the method of payment: cash versus electronic payment. An actual response to a price change allows the authors to estimate the sensitivity of consumer payment demand to prices.
Journal Article
Transforming payment choices by doubling fees on the Illinois Tollway
Using data from the Illinois Tollway, the authors study the effectiveness of a particular application of pricing incentives, in conjunction with a mass-marketing campaign, to foster adoption of electronic toll collection. Dissecting the consumer response by income level, the authors reveal interesting heterogeneity of consumer payment choice in this environment.