This paper constructs a quantitative general equilibrium life-cycle model with uninsurable labor income to account for the differences in wealth accumulation and homeownership between Korea and the United States. The model incorporates different structures in the housing market in the two...

Relatively little attention has been given to documenting the evolution of the skill premium (defined as the ratio of the wages of skilled to unskilled workers) in the economies of Central and Eastern Europe, most likely due to the lack of readily available data. In this article, we first...

This paper constructs a quantitative lifecycle model with uninsurable labor income and housing return risk to investigate how Korean households make saving and portfolio decisions. The model not only incorporates the special roles housing plays in the portfolio of households: collateral, a...

We construct a quantitative general equilibrium lifecycle model with housing tenure decisions to investigate the degree to which wealth inequality in the United States is affected by the preferential tax treatment of home-ownership. Favorable tax treatment of owner occupied housing in the form...

Regulation of retail finance has been the subject of policy interventions in several countries, including India. Much of the regulatory change in India has been carried out with little support of empirical evidence. This paper is motivated by questions of the evidence of losses due to mis-sales...

We investigate whether households adjust retirement savings decisions in re-sponse to changes in the means-tested public pension plans. The policy in question lowered the taper rate of the assets test on the age pension in Australia in 2007. We use HILDA, a detailed micro panel data-set for...

Mutual fund companies typically charge investors distribution fees, such as 12b-1 fees in the United States, which they then use to pay commissions to brokers. We evaluate a major Indian investor protection reform that limited the ability of mutual funds to charge distribution fees to pay broker...

In December 2010, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh passed a law that severely restricted the operations of micro-finance institutions and brought the micro-finance industry to an abrupt halt. We measure the impact of micro-credit withdrawal in this unique natural experiment and find that...