Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:D15 

Working Paper
Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings Inequality

We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital accumulation that allows for heterogeneity in preferences for work, initial human capital and learning ability, as well as idiosyncratic shocks to human capital throughout the life-cycle. Our calibrated model implies that almost 20 percent of the variance in lifetime earnings is accounted for by differences in ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-024

Report
Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View

We provide new time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We use three identification strategies: OLS with a rich set of controls, the Saiz housing supply elasticity instrument, and a new instrument that exploits systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles. All three identification strategies indicate that housing wealth elasticities were if anything slightly smaller in the 2000s than in earlier time periods. This implies that the important role housing played in the boom and bust of the 2000s was due to larger price movements ...
Staff Report , Paper 593

Working Paper
How Small is Small? Non-linearities in Heterogeneous Agent Models

In plausibly calibrated heterogeneous-agent models, marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) are highly non-linear in wealth, falling sharply away from borrowing constraints. As a result, the aggregate consumption response to a fiscal transfer is strongly concave in its size: larger transfers shift households out of high-MPC regions, dampening the consumption response. Across partial- and general-equilibrium settings, linear methods substantially overstate the effects of fiscal stimulus at empirically relevant sizes. Local methods of any order are unlikely to be reliable in settings where a ...
Working Papers , Paper 815

Working Paper
A Day Late and a Dollar Short : Liquidity and Household Formation among Student Borrowers

The federal government encourages human capital investment through lending and grant programs, but resources from these programs may also finance non-education activities for students whose liquidity is otherwise restricted. This paper explores this possibility, using administrative data for the universe of federal student loan borrowers linked to tax records. We examine the effects of a sharp discontinuity in program limits?generated by the timing of a student borrower?s 24th birthday?on household formation early in the lifecycle. After demonstrating that this discontinuity induces a jump in ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-025

Working Paper
Why Are the Wealthiest So Wealthy? New Longitudinal Empirical Evidence and Implications for Theories of Wealth Inequality

CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: Hubmer, Halvorsen, Salgado, Ozkan. We study the lifecycle dynamics of wealth inequality using 1993-2019 Norwegian administrative panel data on wealth and income. Employing a novel budget-constraint approach, we decompose the excess wealth of the top 0.1% households relative to the median between ages 45 and 64 into higher saving rates (36%), inheritances (31%), returns (28%), and labor income (5%). One quarter of the wealthiest—the “New Money”—start with negative wealth on average but accumulate rapidly through high labor income and exceptionally high saving ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-013

Working Paper
Monetary Policy over the Life Cycle

A tighter monetary policy is generally associated with higher real interest rates on depositsand loans, weaker performance of equities and real estate, and slower growth in employment andwages. How does a household’s exposure to monetary policy vary with its age? The size andcomposition of both household income and asset portfolios exhibit large variation over the lifecycle inJapanese data. We formulate an overlapping generations model that reproduces these observationsand use it to analyze how household responses to monetary policy shocks vary over the lifecycle. Boththe signs and the ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-20a

Working Paper
Subjective Earnings and Employment Dynamics

We develop a new approach to estimating earnings, job, and employment dynamics using subjective expectations data from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations. These data provide beliefs about future earnings offers and acceptance probabilities, offering direct information on counterfactual outcomes and enabling identification under weaker assumptions. Our framework avoids biases from selection and unobserved heterogeneity that affect models using realized outcomes. First-step fixed-effects regressions identify risk, persistence, and transition effects; second-step GMM recovers the ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 126

Working Paper
Cohabitation, Child Development, and College Costs

US college-educated couples with children marry at higher rates than those without a college degree. We argue that marriage, which entails lower separation risk and more equitable asset division if separation occurs, provides insurance to the lower-earning spouse, facilitating child investment. Investing in children is more valuable for college-educated couples, who are more likely to send their children to college. Using an OLG model of marriage, cohabitation, wealth accumulation, and educational investments where college is costly and completion is risky, we find that high college costs ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 122

Working Paper
Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings Inequality

We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital accumulation that allows for heterogeneity in preferences for work, initial human capital and learning ability, as well as idiosyncratic shocks to human capital throughout the life-cycle. Our calibrated model implies that almost 20 percent of the variance in lifetime earnings is accounted for by differences in ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-024

Working Paper
Marriage and Work Among Prime-Age Men

Married men work more hours than men who have never been married. Fixed effect regressions reveal that part of this gap is attributable to an increase in work around the time of marriage. Two potential explanations for the increase are: (i) men hit by positive labor market shocks are more likely to marry; and (ii) marriage leads men to work more hours. Using a structural life-cycle model, we find that marriage substantially increases male hours of work. Counterfactual simulations suggest that declining marriage rates account for roughly half of the fall in prime-age male hours observed over ...
Working Papers , Paper 2313

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

Blandin, Adam 6 items

Halvorsen, Elin 5 items

Hubmer, Joachim 5 items

Ozkan, Serdar 5 items

Salgado, Sergio 5 items

Jones, John Bailey 4 items

show more (93)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

E21 22 items

D14 14 items

G51 12 items

J22 11 items

D12 6 items

show more (55)

FILTER BY Keywords

bequests 5 items

lifecycle wealth dynamics 5 items

rate of return heterogeneity 5 items

saving rate heterogeneity 5 items

wealth inequality 5 items

inequality 4 items

show more (172)

PREVIOUS / NEXT