We present an economy where aggregate risk aversion is stochastic and state-dependent in response to information about the wider economy. A factor model is used to link aggregate risk aversion to the business cycle and to handle high-dimensionality of the information about the economy. Our...

We examine how women's employment leads to household technology adoption in the context of mid-century United States. We posit that this relationship is strongest for households with low earning capacity whose consumption-leisure tradeoff crosses a threshold as women go to work. Using WWII...

This paper studies sequential price discrimination of sophisticated present-biased consumers in the credit market. The optimal contract utilizes present bias to improve screening by inducing certain consumers to over-consume and over-accumulate debt. This shows that the optimal contract can have...

Racial disparities are widespread throughout the U.S. justice system; in arrests and incarceration. These disparities are typically explained by appealing to racial biases among the police and the judiciary. I present a model in which disparities arise between groups in spite of unbiased actions...

We analyze the extent to which three important factors can explain the high costs of health care in the US relative to the UK: (i) the high cost of medical education, (ii) high risks/costs associated with malpractice litigation, and (iii) excessive diagnostic testing arising from the practice of...

The annuity market in the US has been historically small. What drives this fact? The annuity market could be small because of adverse selection or supply-side frictions in insurance markets. Identifying demand- and supply-side frictions is difficult without data separately measuring exogenous...

An organization must make a binary choice in each of two periods. The optimal choice depends on an unknown state of nature. The leader of the organization has a stock of political capital and observes a private signal of the state. The leader faces an inter-temporal choice problem. She may...

Spillover effects of US uncertainty shocks are studied in a panel VAR of fifteen emerging market economies (EMEs). A US uncertainty shock negatively affects EME stock prices and exchange rates, raises EME country spreads, and decreases capital inflows into them. It decreases EME output and...

We propose a new finite sample corrected variance estimator for the linear generalized method of moments (GMM) including the one-step, two-step, and iterated estimators. Our formula additionally corrects for the over-identification bias in variance estimation on top of the commonly used finite...

Life insurance premiums display significant rigidity in the data, on average adjusting once every 3 years by more than 10%. This contrasts with the underlying marginal cost which exhibits considerable volatility due to the movements in interest and mortality rates. We build a model where...