In this paper, we find that the age-adjusted elasticity of child wealth with respect to parental wealth is 0.37 before the transfer of bequests. Lifetime income and asset ownership jointly explain nearly two-thirds of the wealth elasticity. Education, past parental transfers, and expected future...

The propensity to become a business owner is a nonlinear function of wealth. The relationship between wealth and entry into entrepreneurship is essentially flat over the majority of the wealth distribution. It is only at the top of the wealth distributionafter the ninety-fifth percentilethat a...

We revisit two well-known facts regarding life cycle expenditures: the “hump”-shaped profile of nondurable expenditures and the increase in cross-household consumption inequality. We document that the behavior of total nondurables masks surprising heterogeneity in the life cycle profile of...

Recent empirical work on financial crises documents that crises tend to occur when macroeconomic fundamentals are weak; but even after conditioning on an exhaustive list of fundamentals, a sizable random component to crises and associated capital flows remains. We develop a model of herd...

We analyze the effects of money injections on interest rates and exchange rates when agents must pay a Baumol-Tobin-style fixed cost to exchange bonds and money. Asset markets are endogenously segmented because this fixed cost leads agents to trade bonds and money infrequently. When the...