This paper develops an agent-based modelling approach to quantify the impact of COVID-19-induced economic disruptions on household debt and unplanned savings over 2020. We merge data from the Survey of Financial Security and the Survey of Household Spending to construct a representative...

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. We trace the impact of shifts in non-price...

This paper exploits a detailed new dataset with comprehensive panel financial information on millions of American households to investigate the interaction between household balance sheets, income, and consumption during the Great Recession. In particular, I test whether consumption among...

This paper demonstrates that credit reporting -- banks observing households' default histories -- can cause slow recoveries of housing prices and employment from mortgage crises. Comparing credit cycles with and without credit reporting and capturing the impact of mortgage default on employment...

In this paper, we evaluate Danish homeowners' interest-rate sensitivity in terms of the partial effect of a 1 percentage point increase in interest rates on homeowners cash flows and balance sheets. We construct two measures to quantify the effect of an increase in interest rates on homeowners....

I study how unsecured credit affects the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) policies smooth cyclical fluctuations in aggregate consumption. To do so, I develop a real business cycle model with incomplete asset markets, frictional labor markets, and defaultable debt. Using empirically...

U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since 2000. We quantify the statistical impact of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, financial assets, expectations, foreclosures, and inequality on county-level consumption growth for four subperiods: the "dot-com...

The recent literature has shown that income inequality is one of the main causes of borrowing and debt accumulation by working households. This paper explores the possibility that household indebtedness is an important cause of rising income inequality. If workers experience rising debt burdens,...

We combine the Decennial Census, credit reports, and administrative earnings to create the first panel dataset linking parent's credit access to the labor market outcomes of children in the U.S.We find that a 10% increase in parent's unused revolving credit during their children's adolescence...