This dissertation consists of three essays on high frequency data, volatility, and disaster risk in macroeconomic modeling. In Chapter I, I verify a credit card transaction dataset for Austria and Germany. I use this dataset in Chapter II to investigate the weekly impact of financial market...

We provide experimental evidence on how fiscal news shapes households' expectations and spending behavior. Using a new survey of ~11,000 Korean individuals linked to automatically collected high-frequency spending data, we elicit respondents' fiscal and macroeconomic beliefs and randomly provide...

Hosting mega-sports events generates optimistic projections of economic benefits, yet empirical evidence on actual local returns remains mixed. Focusing on the UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany, this paper provides causal evidence on the short-term local consumption effects of hosting mega-events. We...

We use small-area estimation methods that combine information from a household budget survey, a much larger survey of local demographics and employment, and area-level information on bank account outflows and energy consumption to estimate average equivalised consumption measures across 367...

Ceremonies are central to social life, yet the pressure to conform to community spending norms traps households in a collectively suboptimal equilibrium, imposing severe financial burdens. Using nationally and regionally representative longitudinal data from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, we...

We examine tail dependence between consumer sentiment and spending during crises, focusing on COVID-19 and the Global Financial Crisis. Using copula models on U.S. monthly data from 2003-2024, we quantify extreme co-movements and find asymmetric tail dependence that intensifies during crises:...

This paper estimates the causal effects of monetary policy shocks on household consumption, with additional analysis of labor market and income responses, disaggregated by gender and race. I find that contractionary monetary policy reduces consumption more for black than white households, with...

Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that endof-life...

This paper leverages quasi-experimental variation from store openings and 1.5 billion grocery transactions to causally estimate the distance elasticity of grocery expenditures (−1.47) and the spatial extent of local consumption areas (approximately 16 minutes of car travel time). We embed...

The risk of a worker falling into unemployment represents one of the most important threats to the stability of households' finances - both in terms of lower spending (and hence living standards) and in terms of a greater degree of financial distress (such as the accumulation of unmanageable...

The fifth wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) offers an updated and comprehensive view of Maltese households' financial position in the post-pandemic period. Based on microdata collected for 2023, this edition introduces two analytical dimensions: in addition to the...

This paper studies household consumption behavior when saving motives differ due to preference or income risk heterogeneity. I show that self-insurance operates along two margins: a standard liquidity margin determined by the level of current resources and an intertemporal margin governed by...

Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that endof- life...

I study how the cognitive demands of financial planning shape household decisionmaking with respect to consumption out of windfall income shocks. I build a quantitative model of bounded rationality in which reoptimization is costly. Households respond to windfall income shocks by choosing a...

This paper examines the channels through which countries smooth income volatility, emphasizing the distinct roles of public and private saving across levels of development and macroeconomic characteristics. Using a panel of 134 countries over 1990–2023 and an accounting-based decomposition of...

We exploit the sharp escalation in community-based ICE enforcement following the January 2025 inauguration to estimate the causal effect of immigration enforcement on consumer spending. Using Synthetic Difference-in-Differences with cross-state variation in surge intensity as the identifying...

Using world commodity prices as an instrument, this paper proposes a novel method for decomposing channels of international risk sharing for commodity-exporting countries. The method identifies the commodity “sector”' as the projection of gross national product growth on commodity-price...

The policies adopted in Chile to mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic stand out for their magnitude: they implied an increase in the liquidity of the household sector of 29 % of the 2019 GDP in an interval of 18 months. We use the 2021 Chilean Household Financial Survey to assess the...

This paper evaluates the impact of Kenya's 2010 constitutional reform, which established 47 semi-autonomous counties and implemented a nationwide decentralization framework with redistributive fiscal transfers favoring 14 historically marginalized regions through a revenue-sharing formula and...

This paper investigates the relationship between piped water access and food consumption in Pakistan utilizing the nationally representative Household Integrated Economic Survey. Access to piped water reduces exposure to waterborne illness, improving health and labor productivity, which can...

Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that end-of-life...

We use a randomized experiment in the Bundesbank Online Panel-Households (n ≈ 3, 900) to show that the estimated link between inflation expectations and household consumption flips sign depending on survey wording. This finding reconciles prior contradictory results and has direct implications...

Can idiosyncratic risk explain the equity premium? We revisit this question using a novel measure of imperfect risk sharing, implied by a large class of heterogeneous-agent models, constructed using household-level panel data. We identify a group of households - with relatively high income but...

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009 moved research on household debt and its aggregate implications to the forefront of macroeconomics. In this review, we offer a synthesis of this large body of both empirical and theoretical research, and an overview of the most important themes for future...

This paper studies how family structure shapes consumption inequality and poverty in the USA. Using PSID data and a collective household model, we estimate sharing rules for married and cohabitating couples and recover individual-level consumption. In the full sample, cohabitating couples appear...

Earnings uncertainty is central to most heterogeneous-household models. Yet, there is little evidence on how subjective uncertainty, the uncertainty individuals actually perceive, is related to consumption behavior. Using unique data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations, we show that the...

This paper studies how households perceive the transmission of monetary policy and how these perceptions affect their decisions. Using a large-scale survey of over 25,000 U.S. households combined with randomized information treatments, we measure how households expect changes in the federal...

Ceremonies are central to social life, yet the pressure to conform to community spending norms traps households in a collectively suboptimal equilibrium, imposing severe financial burdens. Using nationally and regionally representative longitudinal data from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, we...