We document that married households exhibit substantially larger consumption responses to monetary policy shocks than single households. This gap persists after accounting for standard demographic and balance-sheet characteristics, as well as labor-market dynamics. Married households dedicate a larger budget share to highly elastic luxuries and exhibit stronger responses within this category, jointly accounting for 81 percent of the response gap. We build a quantitative heterogeneous-agent model with non-homothetic preferences and consumption sharing in married households that matches these empirical patterns. By reducing the burden of basic needs, consumption sharing shifts expenditure composition toward luxuries and raises the within-good intertemporal elasticity of substitution, endogenously generating the aggregate response gap. Counterfactual experiments suggest that the secular decline in marriage has attenuated the aggregate consumption response to monetary policy.

We argue that inter vivos transfers from parents to children are much more important than previously thought for the cross-sectional dispersion of income and wealth as well as the inter-generational persistence of those quantities. We document two common features of transfers, front-loading and insurance, that account for their power. We also show how the size and type of transfers made to children vary across the wealth distribution and develop micro-level estimates of the effects of different types of transfers on children`s choices. We establish the importance of these features for macroeconomic outcomes by embedding them in a quantitative overlapping generations (OLG) model with incomplete markets, education choice, and human capital accumulation.

We investigate the role financial conditions play in the composition of U.S. growth-at-risk. We document that, by a wide margin, growth-at-risk is investment-at-risk. That is, if financial conditions indicate U.S. real GDP growth will be in the lower tail of its conditional distribution, we know that quantitatively, the main contributor is a decline in investment. Consumption contributes under extreme financial stress. Government spending and net exports do not play a role. We show that leverage plays a key role in determining both consumption- and investment-at-risk, which provides support to the financial accelerator mechanism proposed by Bernanke et al. (1999).

We provide evidence on the real-time predictive content of the National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI), for conditional quantiles of U.S. real GDP growth. Our work is distinct from the literature in two specific ways. First, we construct (unofficial) real-time vintages of the NFCI. This allows us to conduct out-of-sample analysis without introducing the kind of look-ahead biases that are naturally introduced when using a single current vintage. We then develop methods for conducting asymptotic inference on tests of equal tick loss between nested quantile regression models when the data are subject to revision. We conclude by evaluating the real-time predictive content of NFCI vintages for quantiles of real GDP growth. While our results largely reinforce the literature, we find gains to using real-time vintages leading up to recessions — precisely when policymakers need such a monitoring device.

This paper investigates the disparate industrial effects of U.S. presidential election news and outcomes. By orthogonalizing prediction market probabilities to macroeconomic and financial data, I isolate unexpected shifts in electoral prospects. I then use these exogenous shocks to evaluate industries categorized by their political contributions, proxying for their alignment with a particular party’s policies. On impact, an unexpected increase in Republican win probabilities sharply raises stock prices for Republican-favoring industries, with little effect on Democrat-favoring counterparts. Conversely, medium-term responses reveal aggregate stock price declines alongside substantial decreases in employment and revenues for Democrat-favoring sectors. Ultimately, election shocks operate as news shocks, driving immediate and persistent sectoral reallocations.