Tracking Owners’ Sentiments: Subjective Home Values, Expectations and House Price Dynamics Economic theory predicts that expectations on future house price growth are related to the current price of a house. We test this relationship for the supply side of the secondary housing market using micro data that links individual expectations...

“Risk management in traditional agriculture: intercropping in Italian wine production” joint with Giovanni Federico (NYU Abu Dhabi). This paper investigates the causes of the traditional practice of intercropping – i.e., of scattering vines across fields rather than concentrating them in specialized vineyards. We interpret it as a risk management strategy...

It Takes Two to Borrow: The Effects of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act on Homeownership and Mortgage Debt of Married Couples Until the 1970s, it was a common practice for U.S. mortgage lenders to discount the wife’s income in a couple’s joint mortgage application. This changed with the Equal Credit...

“The 1918 Epidemic and a V-shaped Recession: Evidence from Municipal Income Data” We combine high-quality vital statistics data with annual income data at the municipality level to study the economic aftermath of the 1918-influenza epidemic in Denmark. Controlling for pre-epidemic trends, we find that more severely affected municipalities experienced short-run...

The Great Divergence: Wealth Accumulation and Distribution since 1980 Wealth-income ratios have strongly increased in developed countries since the 1980s, virtually doubling from values around 300% to 600% of national income (Piketty and Zucman 2014). However, the drivers of this rise or implications for the wealth distribution are not well...

“What Happened to the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-level Data, 1909–1950” Much of the overall income equalization during the first half of the twentieth century appears to have been due to shifts in the shares of the incomes of the rich, such as the top 1...

Repayment Flexibility and Risk Taking: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh. Joint with Marianna Battaglia and Andreas Madestam. A widely-held view is that small firms in developing countries are prevented from making profitable investments by lack of access to credit and insurance markets. One solution is to provide repayment flexibility in credit...