We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

“Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) and other forms of consumer credit create a wedge between consumption and payments. We introduce this wedge into a standard consumption-based asset pricing model (CCAPM). In equilibrium, the pricing kernel equals the marginal utility of consumption divided by the...

This paper examines a canonical stochastic overlapping generations model with dynamically complete markets. Belief differences lead agents to place bets against each other and so wealth shifts across agents and across generations. Such changes in the wealth distribution strongly affect prices of...

How predictable are personal income tax rates in the U.S., and does household spending respond to news about future taxes even before the rates change? To answer these questions, this paper uses novel historical high-frequency data of tax-exempt municipal bonds and develops a model of the term...

I analyze transaction-level data gathered by a financial aggregator fintech to study the effects of three waves of Economic Impact Payment (EIP) stimulus checks on households’ investment, consumption, and savings decisions. I estimate the aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of...

Carroll and Kimball (1996) show that the consumption function for an agent with time-separable, isoelastic preferences is concave in the presence of income uncertainty. In this paper I show that concavity breaks down if we abandon time-separability. Namely, if an agent maximizing an isoelastic...

We study the sensitivity of optimal consumption streams with respect to perturbations of the random endowment. At the leading order, the consumption adjustment does not matter: any choice that matches the budget constraint simply shifts the original utility by the marginal value of the...

We develop a novel dynamic model of banking showing that aggregate bank capital is an important determinant of bank lending. In our model commercial banks finance their loans with deposits and equity, while facing equity issuance costs. Because of this financial friction, banks build equity...

This paper studies the Cass-Koopmans-Ramsey model of optimal economic growth in the presence of loss aversion and habit formation. The representative agent's preferences for consumption can be gradually varied between the standard constant intertemporal elasticity of substitution (CIES) case and...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate binds, monetary policy makers may lack traditional tools to stimulate aggregate demand. We investigate whether "unconventional" fiscal policy, in the form of pre-announced consumption tax changes, has the potential to meaningfully shift durables...