Papers

Population aging is occurring around the world, presenting a number of policy challenges. Most notably, it will increase dependency ratios, making it more difficult for governments to support their older populations. As a result, tax policy will need to...

Disability and widowhood are major drivers of economic insecurity for women later in life. To reduce the risk of economic insecurity among older women, we propose to allow Social Security beneficiaries to forgo some benefits when claiming to finance...

The effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of long‐standing interest to economists. Conventional wisdom suggests that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity both in the United States and abroad. This paper...

Some recent studies suggest that high levels of household debt and leverage have contributed to the relatively sluggish growth of consumer spending in the past few years (Dynan, 2012; Mian, Rao, and Sufi, 2013). However, this conclusion has not been...

Using a representative longitudinal survey of U.S. households, we find that household income became noticeably more volatile between the early 1970s and the late 2000s despite the moderation seen in aggregate economic activity during this period. We...

The recent plunge in U.S. home prices left many households that had borrowed voraciously during the credit boom highly leveraged, with very high levels of debt relative to the value of their assets. Analysts often assert that this “debt overhang” created...

The financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession left huge scars on household balance sheets, with households approaching retirement seeing the largest decline in wealth. This chapter examines how these households have adjusted to these developments. To...