We provide new time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. These estimates are based on a new identification strategy that exploits systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles as an instrument for house prices. Our estimates of housing...

Often, individuals must choose among discrete alternatives with imperfect information about their values, such as selecting a job candidate, a vehicle or a university. Before choosing, they may have an opportunity to study the options, but doing so is costly. This costly information acquisition...

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures how effective they are. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete-markets model of consumption and inequality with the new...