This paper examines the robustness of the Kiyotaki-Moore collateral amplification mechanism to the existence of complete markets for aggregate risk. We show that, when borrowers can hedge against aggregate shocks at fair prices, the volatility of endogenous variables becomes identical to the...

Building on Beaudry, Nam and Wang (2011) { hereafter BNW {, we use survey data on consumer sentiment in order to identify the causal effects of confidence shocks on real economic activity in a selection of advanced economies. Starting from a set of closed-economy VAR models, we show that these...

House price booms in Anglo-Saxon economies and their collapse were an important part of the financial accelerator via consumption, construction and the banking system. This paper examines links for Germany between household portfolios, income and consumption in a six-equation system, for...

We provide a Keynesian growth theory in which pessimistic expectations can lead to very persistent, or even permanent, slumps characterized by unemployment and weak growth. We refer to these episodes as stagnation traps, because they consist in the joint occurrence of a liquidity and a growth...

This paper examines the role of culture in households' saving decisions. Exploiting the historical language borders within Switzerland, I isolate the effect of households' exposure to certain language groups from economic, institutional, demographic and geographic factors for a homogeneous and...

This paper studies the effect of deep recessions on intergenerational inequality by quantifying the welfare effects on households at different phases of the life cycle. Deep recessionary episodes are characterized by large declines in the prices of real and financial assets and in employment....

A large body of microeconomic evidence supports Friedman (1957)'s proposition that household income can be reasonably well described as having both transitory and permanent components. We show how to modify the widely-used macroeconomic model of Krusell and Smith (1998) to accommodate such a...

Using new micro data on household wealth from fifteen European countries, the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, we first document the substantial cross-country variation in how various measures of wealth are distributed across individual households. Through the lens of a standard,...

We present a macroeconomic model calibrated to match both microeconomic and macroeconomic evidence on household income dynamics. When the model is modified in a way that permits it to match empirical measures of wealth inequality in the U.S., we show that its predictions (unlike those of...

Data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study show that many U.S. households experienced large capital losses in housing and financial wealth, and that 5% of respondents lost their job during the Great Recession. As a consequence of these shocks, many households reduced...