China’s household saving rate has increased markedly since the mid-1990s and the age-savings profile has become U-shaped. We find that rising income uncertainty and pension reforms help explain both of these phenomena. Using a panel of Chinese households covering the period 1989-2006, we...

The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of the rich, a large increase in leverage for the remainder, and an eventual financial...

This paper studies overborrowing, financial crises and macro-prudential policy in an equilibrium model of business cycles and asset prices with collateral constraints. Agents in a decentralized competitive equilibrium do not internalize the negative effects of asset fire-sales on the value of...

Uncertainty about the riskiness of new financial products was an important factor behind the U.S. credit crisis. We show that a boom-bust cycle in debt, asset prices and consumption characterizes the equilibrium dynamics of a model with a collateral constraint in which agents learn "by...

This paper outlines a simple approach for incorporating extraneous predictions into structural models. The method allows the forecaster to combine predictions derived from any source in a way that is consistent with the underlying structure of the model. The method is flexible enough that...

Financial frictions have been documented as an important determinant of firm dynamics. In this paper I model bankruptcy procedures, liquidation in particular, as an institutional feature that affects both sides of financial transactions. I construct a model of firm dynamics that generate...

We study a banking model in which banks invest in a riskless asset and compete in both deposit and risky loan markets. The model predicts that as competition increases, both loans and assets increase; however, the effect on the loans-to-assets ratio is ambiguous. Similarly, as competition...

This paper revisits the cross-country growth empirics debate using a novel Limited Information Bayesian Model Averaging framework to address model uncertainty in the context of a dynamic growth model in panel data with endogenous regressors. Our empirical findings suggest that once model...

Recent work on the political economy of fiscal policy has asked how budgetary institutions affect fiscal outcomes. But what determines the budgetary institutions? In this paper I consider one such institution: the executive veto. A simple theoretical framework predicts that jurisdictions with...