With medical expenditures constituting an increasingly large share of private spending, the continuing policy debate on health care reform in the United States is a potentially important source of households' financial uncertainty. To quantify the implications of this uncertainty for the real...

This paper investigates the impact of uncertainty on consumer credit outcomes. We develop a local measure of economic uncertainty capturing county-level labor market shocks. We then exploit microeconomic data on mortgages and credit-card balances together with the crosssectional variation...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the effect of health care policy uncertainty (HCPU) on households’ portfolio choice. A causal identification approach is developed, whose key assumption is the existence of an exogenous variable that shifts responsiveness to HCPU without shifting...

Using new employer-employee matched data, this paper investigates the impact of uncertainty, as measured by idiosyncratic stock market volatility, on individual outcomes. We find that firms provide at best partial insurance to their workers. Increased firm-level uncertainty reduces total...

In this paper, we analyze the borrowing behavior of Japanese households in comparison to the other Group of Seven (G7) countries and also broken down by the age group of the household head. We find that pre-retirement households (households with a head in the 50-59 age group) in Japan do not...

We analyse how the financial support for long-term elderly care affects the level of household savings. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we investigate the 2002 Scottish reform, which introduced free formal personal care for all the elderly aged 65 and above residing in Scotland. Our...

We analyse how the financial support for long-term elderly care affects the household's propensity to save. Using the difference-in-differences estimator, we investigate the 2002 Scottish reform, which introduced free formal personal care for all the Scottish elderly aged 65 and above. We find...

Genetic factors play a major role in the development of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Observable genetic factors could impact household planning and medical care if they contain actionable information, meaning that they i) are associated with significant harms, ii) reflect...

In this paper, we analyze the borrowing behavior of Japanese households in comparison to the other Group of Seven (G7) countries and also broken down by the age group of the household head. We find that pre-retirement households (households with a head in the 50-59 age group) in Japan do not...

There are increasing concerns about whether Americans are saving enough for retirement. Recent research has called for improved understanding of the relationship between family structure and economic preparation for retirement at earlier stages of the life course. Using multiple years of the...