This paper examines households' financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up
with $2,000 in 30 days. Using data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic Crisis survey, we …

The study of household finance is challenging because household behavior is difficult to
measure, and households face constraints not captured by textbook models. Evidence on …

The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (cash,
checking, and savings accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (assets …

Many households devote a large fraction of their budgets to “consumption commitments”—
goods that involve transaction costs and are infrequently adjusted. This paper characterizes …

We show that characterizing the effects of housing on portfolios requires distinguishing
between the effects of home equity and mortgage debt. We isolate exogenous variation in …

This paper shows how home equity may substitute for long-term care insurance (LTCI). The
elderly commonly hold substantial wealth in the form of home equity that is rarely spent …

We analyze the implications of household‐level adjustment costs for the dynamics of
aggregate consumption. We show that an economy in which agents have “consumption …

While it is recognized that the family is a risk-sharing institution, little is known about the
quantitative effects of this source of insurance on savings and labor supply. In this paper, we …

We develop a technique to assess the impact of changes in mortgage markets on
households, exploiting an implication of the permanent income hypothesis: The higher a …

Annuities, long‐term care insurance (LTCI), and reverse mortgages appear to offer important
consumption smoothing benefits to the elderly, yet private markets for these products are …