When agents have rational expectations, anticipated changes in the structure of the economy have an immediate affect on their behaviour. In this article, we investigate the interplay between a linear rational expectation model with predictable structural changes and reduced-form evidence of...

Banks have historically provided mutual insurance against asset risk, where the insurance arrangement itself was characterized by limited enforcement. This paper shows that a non-trivial interaction between asset and liquidity risk plays a crucial role in shaping optimal banking arrangements in...

American consumer bankruptcy provides for a Fresh Start through the discharge of a household’s debt. Until recently, many European countries specified a No Fresh Start policy of life-long liability for debt. The trade-off between these two policies is that while Fresh Start provides insurance...

Globally, wealth is very unequally distributed, both within countries and between countries. The UNUWIDER project on Personal Assets from a Global Perspective has found for instance that the richest 10 percent of adults in the world own 85 percent of global household wealth. Of these...

We construct a unique panel of retail food prices in 69 Canadian and 51 U.S. cities during the Interwar (1920-40) period. Surprisingly, we find that average relative price dispersion across cities within Canada and the U.S., and the role of distance in accounting for cross-city price...

There are large countercyclical fluctuations in U.S. bankruptcy filings and real credit card interest rates, while unsecured credit is pro-cyclical. This paper documents the facts and asks whether the predictions of incomplete market models with bankruptcy are consistent with these facts. We...

This paper investigates the effect of private pensions on the retirement wealth distribution. We incorporate stochastic private pension coverage into a calibrated life-cycle model with stochastic earnings. Private pensions lead to higher net worth inequality at retirement, which is closer to the...

Canadian households are saddled with unprecedented amounts of debt. As a percentage of income, debt levels of Canadians are higher than at any point in recent history and are now higher than those of American households. Recent debates have largely focussed on the housing market and on the risks...

Financial innovations are a common explanation for the rise in credit card debt and bankruptcies. To evaluate this story, we develop a simple model that incorporates two key frictions: asymmetric information about borrowers’ risk of default and a fixed cost of developing each contract lenders...

Detailed macroeconomic data to accompany the article in the Review of Economic Dynamics