This paper shows empirically that the non-employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) for older workers depend in a first-order way on the structure of retirement policies. Using German data, we first present reduced-form evidence of these interactions, documenting large bunching in UI...

We find expectations are more sensitive to economic growth than traditional wellbeing metrics. We examine Eurobarometer micro data from 1973-2023 on movements in life satisfaction along with data from 1995-2022 on five expectations variables on and individual's life and their financial and job...

This paper studies the effects of threat on convergence to local culture and economic assimilation of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We combine novel survey data on cultural preferences and economic outcomes of...

The boundary discontinuity method of causal inference may yield misleading results if a policy's impacts do not stop at the border of the implementing jurisdiction. We use geographically precise longitudinal employment data documenting worker job-to-job mobility to study policy spillovers in the...

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...

In his papers during the lead up to the birth of the European Monetary Union, Obstfeld considered whether the countries forming the EMU were sufficiently similar to survive a single monetary policy--and more importantly, whether they had the capacity to adjust to asymmetric shocks given a single...

In line with Keynes' intuition, volatility in the stock market and in real economic activity are linked by expectations of long term profits. We show that analysts' optimism about the long term earnings growth of S&P 500 firms is associated with a near term boom in major US financial markets,...

Uncertainty is a ubiquitous concern emphasized by policymakers. We study how uncertainty affects decision-making by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). We distinguish between the notion of Fed-managed uncertainty vis-a-vis uncertainty that emanates from within the economy and which the Fed...

This paper reviews recent developments in macro and finance on the relationship between financial risk and the real economy. We focus on three specific topics: the term structure of uncertainty, time variation - and specifically the long-term decline - in the variance risk premium, and time...

This paper studies the effectiveness of forward guidance when central banks have imperfect credibility. Exploiting unique survey-based measures of expected inflation, output growth, and interest rates, we estimate a small-scale New Keynesian model for the United States and other G7 countries...