Aggressive deregulation of the mortgage market in the early 1980s triggered innovations that greatly reduced indebted households' required home equity, and a borrowing surge followed. This paper uses a calibrated general equilibrium model of lending from the wealthy to the middle class to...

For many kinds of capital, depreciation rates change systematically with the age of the capital. Consider an example that captures essential aspects of human capital, both regarding its accumulation and its depreciation: a worker obtains knowledge in period 0, then uses this knowledge in...