Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...

Using detailed micro data, we document that households often use "stimulus" checks to pay down debt, especially those with low net wealth-to-income ratios. To rationalize these patterns, we introduce a borrowing price schedule into an otherwise standard incomplete markets model. Because interest...

Consumers access foreign goods by purchasing them domestically or shopping abroad. We present new facts on cross-border shopping by Swiss households showing, for example, that prices of identical products are lower in neighboring countries, cross-border shopping shares fall with distance to the...

This paper presents an empirical examination of oligopoly pricing and consumer search. The theoretical model allows for sequential and non-sequential search and, using the theoretical restrictions firm and consumer behavior impose on the data, we study the empirical validity of the models. Two...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants...

The conditional equity premium in the model with production is often approximated by assuming a jointly log-normal distribution of the marginal rate of substitution in consumption and the marginal productivity of capital. We show that, for standard parameterization, this premium is about one...

Reliable early warning signals are essential for timely implementation of macroeconomic and macro-prudential policies. This paper presents an early warning system as a set of multi-period forecasts of indicators of tail real and financial (systemic) risks. Forecasts are obtained from: (a)...