This article focuses on the effect of race and ethnicity on financial risk tolerance. Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to be willing to take some financial risk but more likely to be willing to take substantial financial risk than Whites, after controlling for the effects of other variables....

Conventional advice is to reduce risky investments as one ages. Such a generalized focus on risk avoidance may be inappropriate for elderly with longer life spans and those with financial goals that extend beyond their lifetime. To better understand risky asset holdings among the elderly, we...

The authors develop a life-cycle model to study the effects of house price changes on household consumption and welfare. The model explicitly incorporates the dual feature of housing as both a consumption good and an investment asset and allows for costly adjustments in housing and mortgage...

We develop a life-cycle model that explicitly incorporates the dual feature of housing as both a consumption good and an investment asset. Our analysis indicates that the consumption and welfare consequences of house price changes on individual households vary significantly. In particular, the...

We estimate a structural model of optimal life-cycle housing and nonhousing con- sumption in the presence of labor income and house price uncertainties. The model postulates constant elasticity of substitution between housing service and nonhousing consumption, and explicitly incorporates a...

understanding of housing market developments on general activities. We use the estimated model to conduct policy experiments and find that consumption responds nonlinearly to changes in housing wealth with an average marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth of about 5 percent.