We construct a new data set of consumption and income data for the largest US metropolitan areas, and we show that the covariance of regional consumption and income growth varies over time and in the cross-section. In times and regions where collateral is scarce, regional consumption growth is...

We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. Using the regulatory reporting of historical lapse rates by life insurers, we empirically document the counter-cyclicality of lapsation behavior. We construct two lapsation risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common...

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance has doubled over the past two years and is projected to redouble to $1.5 trillion over the next five. Despite clear signs of strain in the FHA's Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund, a recent actuarial review indicates that the FHA will not need any form...

Earnings risk is central to economic analysis. While this risk is essentially subjective, it is typically inferred from administrative data. Following the lead of Dominitz and Manski, 1997, we introduce a survey instrument to measure subjective earnings risk. We pay particular attention to the...

We show that firms' idiosyncratic volatility obeys a strong factor structure and that shocks to the common factor in idiosyncratic volatility (CIV) are priced. Stocks in the lowest CIV-beta quintile earn average returns 5.4% per year higher than those in the highest quintile. The CIV factor...

Investors in option markets price in a substantial collective government bailout guarantee in the financial sector, which puts a floor on the equity value of the financial sector as a whole, but not on the value of the individual firms. The guarantee makes put options on the financial sector...

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibriummodel of the housing market where a large number of overlapping generations of homeowners face both idiosyncratic and aggregate risks but have limited opportunities to insure against these risks due to incomplete financial markets and...

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...

This paper studies the role of time-varying risk premia as a channel for generating and propagating fluctuations in housing markets, aggregate quantities, and consumption and wealth heterogeneity. We study a two-sector general equilibrium model of housing and non-housing production where...

This paper studies the link between bank mortgage lending and house prices by asking whether macroprudential policies that impose higher risk weights on high LTV mortgages can slow house price growth. For housing units likely to be purchased using mortgages subject to the higher risk weights, we...