In the United States, student debt currently represents the second largest component of consumer debt, just after mortgage loans. Repayment of those loans reduces disposable income early in the borrower's lifecycle, when marginal utility is particularly high, and limits their ability to build a...

We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of job displacement using Canadian job separation records. To circumvent administrative data limitations, conventional approaches address selection by identifying displacement effects through mass-layoff separations, which are...

We evaluate, both empirically and theoretically, the spillover effects that debt-financed fiscal policy interventions of the United States have on other economies. We first consider a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with international portfolio rebalancing effects...

Using U.S. county-level data from 1990 to 2010, we study the causal impact of immigration on the provision of local public goods. We uncover substantial heterogeneity across immigrants with different skills, mainly due to the asymmetric impact immigrants have on the per capita tax base and local...

This paper studies the testable implication of players' collusive or cooperative behaviours in a binary choice game with complete information. In this paper, these behaviours are defined as players coordinating their actions to maximize the weighted sum of their payoffs. I show that this...

Models of microeconomic consumption (including those used in heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models) typically calibrate the size of income risk to match panel data on household income dynamics. But, for several reasons, what is measured as risk from such data may not correspond to the risk...

This paper proposes a unique approach to simulate intraday transactions in the Canadian retail payments batch system. Such transactions are currently unobtainable. The simulation procedure, though demonstrated in the realm of payments systems, has tremendous potential for helping with...

This paper measures how both geographical and cultural proximity of bank branches affect household credit choice and pricing. We examine both types of proximity jointly to separately identify the importance of soft information versus alternative mechanisms. Using a detailed household-level...

This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the unintended consequences of mandatory retention rules in securitization. The Dodd-Frank Act and the EU Securitisation Regulation both impose a 5% mandatory retention requirement to motivate screening and monitoring. I first propose a novel...

This paper uses a large historical dataset (1870-2016) for 16 industrial economies to show that during macroeconomic disasters (e.g., wars, pandemics, depressions) aggregate consumption and income are significantly less decoupled than during normal times. That is, during these times of turmoil,...