Administrative earnings data reveal that households are exposed to large, countercyclical idiosyncratic tail risks in labor earnings. I illustrate how these risks affect asset prices within an asset pricing framework with recursive preferences, heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets. Quantitatively, a model in which agents face a time-varying probability of experiencing a rare, idiosyncratic disaster, with parameters disciplined by data, matches the level and dynamics of the equity premium. Stock returns are highly informative about labor market event risk, and, consistent with model predictions, initial claims for unemployment, a proxy for labor market uncertainty, is a highly robust predictor of returns.

Calibration, the practice of choosing the parameters of a structural model to match certain empirical moments, can be viewed as minimum distance estimation. Existing standard error formulas for such estimators require a consistent estimate of the correlation structure of the empirical moments, which is often unavailable in practice. Instead, the variances of the individual empirical moments are usually readily estimable. Using only these variances, we derive conservative standard errors and confidence intervals for the structural parameters that are valid even under the worst-case correlation structure. In the over-identified case, we show that the moment weighting scheme that minimizes the worst-case estimator variance amounts to a moment selection problem with a simple solution. Finally, we develop tests of over-identifying or parameter restrictions. We apply our methods empirically to a model of menu cost pricing for multi-product firms and to a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model.

We estimate the effect of the spring 2023 failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank on the “connectedness” of US bank stock return volatilities using the forecast error variance decomposition framework of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012, 2014) and Lastrapes and Wiesen (2021). Using split-sample and time-varying VAR methods, we find that those failures significantly increased spillovers across a sample of surviving regional banks, but had only small and temporary effects on spillovers across systemically important too-big-to-fail banks. Our main findings imply that regulatory policy toward systemically important banks has been credible but that additional oversight of regional banks should be considered.

Residential segregation is a central factor in explaining socioeconomic gaps across race and ethnicity in the United States. Place of residence directly impacts access to schools, jobs, and health care. There is an ever-evolving literature across the social sciences disciplines documenting the general patterns in residential segregation as well as the causes and consequences of those patterns. This article reviews key parts of that literature. We provide an overview of the measurement of segregation and the general evolution of segregation patterns over time and at different scales. We then review the literatures on both segregation’s determinants and its impact on a range of socioeconomic outcomes. We highlight the potential for new insights to be gained from new approaches to quantifying segregation and new frameworks such as stratification for understanding its complex roots.

Using global data on syndicated loans, we show that any negative effect of stronger creditor rights on loan spreads, as identified in the prior literature (Qian and Strahan, 2007; Bae and Goyal, 2009), disappears once we include a single country characteristic: country size. This finding is robust to several identification methods, both global samples and within-country changes in creditor rights, different panel spans, and hundreds of control variables. We identify that key origins of the effect of country size on loan pricing are ethnic fractionalization and within-country heterogeneity in economic preferences, which create country risk.

We provide the first national analysis of mortality in the U.S. homeless population by linking 140,000 homeless individuals from the 2010 Census to twelve years of all-cause mortality data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Non-elderly homeless individuals face 3.5 times the mortality risk of the housed after accounting for demographic differences and geography, with a time pattern suggesting that persistently poor health, rather than homelessness itself, primarily drives this disparity. Employment, higher income, and more extensive recent family connections are associated with lower mortality, underscoring the persistence of health disparities into the extreme lower tail of socioeconomic disadvantage.

Pre-IPO firms may “test the waters” by meeting privately with investors in order to allow access to management and more time to make an investment decision. However, these meetings have the potential to undermine the SEC’s objectives of protecting investors and supporting market efficiency by allowing institutional investors, but not retail investors, private access to management. We find lower retail trading after IPOs of firms that held testing-the-waters meetings, consistent with the meetings reducing retail investor participation. Moreover, retail investors that still participate in the market in the presence of testing-the-waters meetings have inferior investment outcomes. Nonetheless, we find no evidence of lower overall market liquidity or slower price discovery following testing-the-waters meetings. In fact, we observe a reduction in stock return volatility. Overall our evidence suggests that, while testing-the-waters meetings may harm retail investors, there does not appear to be a negative impact on overall market function.

We assess issues related to borrower beliefs and mortgage performance using new individual panel data that simultaneously cover borrower expectations, forbearance status during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a wide array of demographic characteristics. First, we establish the determinants of borrower expectations, with local experiences and those of social networks playing important roles. We then show that households who, at origination, were optimistic about future house price appreciation or pessimistic about the possibility of future unemployment were more likely to enter forbearance in 2020. However, by early 2021, appreciation-optimistic borrowers who were in forbearance were likely to have cured or prepaid their loan, while those who expected unemployment were likely to still be in forbearance. We offer three channels by which expectations affect forbearance behavior: choices of initial loan terms, associations with actual future events, and factors related to belief formation that are also plausibly associated with forbearance. Our findings highlight the crucial role borrower expectations play in both leverage choices and mortgage performance.

We use staggered enactments of state stakeholder constituency laws as a natural experiment to examine the effect of such laws on corporate pension risk shifting. Our analysis encompasses three components of pension risk shifting: funding risk, investment risk, and benefit risk. We observe a reduction in all three elements of pension risk shifting following the enactment of stakeholder orientation laws that promote greater consideration of stakeholder interests. We also find that the post-enactment reduction in pension risk-shifting is greater for firms with fewer investment opportunities. Overall, our results provide insight into how stakeholder constituency can mitigate an important form of risk-shifting.