We show that incorporating consumption commitments into a standard model of precautionary saving can complicate the usual relationship between risk and consumption. In particular, we present a model where the presence of plausible adjustment costs can cause a mean-preserving increase in...

The Netherlands is one of the most flood prone countries in the world. It also has the best flood defenses in the world that are built to make floods an extremely rare event. This paper uses the unique Dutch setting to provide evidence on the price and perception of rare environmental disasters....

I study the effects of improved public information on equilibrium welfare and price dispersion, providing sufficient conditions for negative and positive effects. Public information affects welfare by reducing excessive (though rational) pessimism induced by sequential learning. Reduced...

This paper studies whether the interplay of social comparisons in housing and rising income inequality contributed to the household debt boom in the US between 1980 and 2007. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with general social comparisons in housing to show that changes in the...

It is a well-established fact that many retirees do not utilize their accumulated housing equity to help smooth and increase consumption in retirement as is predicted by the Life-Cycle Hypothesis. In this paper, I explore how older Americans may retain their housing equity to help pay off...

The performance of the Irish economy over the period 2002-2019 varied considerably, with a credit-led boom up to 2007 being followed by a sharp fall in economic activity and house prices in the following five years. This provides a valuable sample for investigating the relevance of the housing...

We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

The share of the private rental housing market in Central and Eastern European countries is low. With a survey data from Poland, I show that strong tenure preferences of households toward owning can be attributed to both economic and psychological factors. Building on these findings, I develop a...

We analyse the decline of household saving rates in the bottom half of the income distribution in Germany since the 2000s, which allowed for only moderately increasing consumption inequality, despite sharply rising income inequality. We combine survey data on household consumption with our own...