Abstract: The literature has documented a counterintuitive positive link between earnings volatility and stock holdings, posing a puzzle to researchers. I illustrate that this link is driven almost entirely by the right tail of the earnings distribution. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), I construct a tail-dependent measure that interacts individuals’ labor income growth variance with its skewness. Holding income volatility constant, investors exposed to right-tail shocks (opportunity risk) increase their equity share, while those facing left-tail shocks (disaster risk) sharply reduce it. Moreover, the tail effects are asymmetric: left-tail risk hurts virtually all investors, whereas right-tail risk benefits only a subset. These results show that higher-order moments of labor-income risk shape portfolio choice, highlight the limitations of variance-based uncertainty metrics, and offer micro-level support for more robust portfolio-choice models.

Abstract: Using transaction-level data on Chinese retail investors across a boom–bust cycle, we study how salient realized outcomes shape the disposition effect. We measure experience as counts of large realized gains or losses and find a sharp asymmetry: sequences of large gains attenuate the disposition effect, whereas sequences of large losses amplify it. To account for these facts, we develop a disciplined memory-based recall model in which similarity-weighted retrieval of past outcomes guides sell decisions. The model reproduces both the baseline disposition effect and the documented asymmetries, highlighting the critical—and asymmetric—role of experience in shaping trading behavior.

Abstract: Is the cross-sectional price of idiosyncratic housing risk constant, or does it vary with market conditions? Using 586,000 Beijing apartment listings matched to transactions and platform engagement data over 2015–2021, I measure ex-ante valuation uncertainty from hedonic residual dispersion and document three findings. First, within community and month, higher uncertainty predicts lower listing-implied pricing wedges. Second, this uncertainty discount is 2.4 times larger in magnitude after the late-2016 “housing is for living, not for speculation” policy regime shift—a result that survives head-to-head controls for leverage, liquidity, inventory, and financing, and that extends to realized transaction prices. Only valuation uncertainty, not competing proxies, exhibits a sharp structural break at the policy date. Third, the repricing is concentrated in communities with high pre-period platform attention—consistent with, though not uniquely identified by, a shift in the composition of marginal buyers. A heterogeneous-buyer CARA–Normal bargaining model organizes the reduced-form evidence, and a compact estimated search-and-listing framework recovers the regime-specific uncertainty discount, seller pricing discipline, and liquidity cost. The evidence establishes that the cross-sectional price of housing uncertainty is regime-dependent in the Beijing market.

Abstract: Japanese pre-retirement households face three times the income variance of young households yet identical variance of log total and log necessity consumption. Using the JHPS/KHPS panel (2004–2022), I show that necessity variance is flat across age groups while discretionary variance carries the cross-sectional action, and that the BPP permanent pass-through to discretionary goods (φ̂_d = 0.170) is roughly twice that to necessities (φ̂_n = 0.078). A Stone–Geary life-cycle model with an age-60 lump-sum transfer reproduces this ratio as an equilibrium outcome. I read the pre-retirement compression as jointly consistent with non-homothetic preferences, private-compensation responses, and the anticipated age-60 institutional income decline.

Abstract: Using SIPP 2014–2023 panels, I document that student debt is associated with opposite-signed differences across household portfolio margins: debt holders are 2.8–3.0 percentage points (pp) more likely to participate in 401(k) plans but 0.6–5.5 pp less likely to own a home, with 82–93% of the net worth penalty explained mechanically by the debt balance itself. Exploiting the CARES Act payment forbearance (March 2020) as a quasi-experiment, I find that borrowers showed relative net worth gains. A placebo DiD using the 2014 panel reveals a pre-existing secular convergence trend; the 2018-panel estimate is statistically indistinguishable from this placebo, but a formal trend-break test confirms a discrete forbearance effect (p = 0.007) above the secular trend, and the 2020-panel trend-adjusted estimate remains significant (p < 0.001). The net worth result is robust to alternative transformations, pandemic-era controls, and randomization inference. With three post-forbearance years, borrowers also enter homeownership (+3.0 pp, p = 0.046), though concurrent housing conditions may have contributed. Within-person debt transitions show nearly symmetric effects of gaining and losing debt, and acquiring debt is associated with higher 401(k) participation—consistent with debt-financed human capital investment coinciding with entry into jobs offering retirement plans. However, the 401(k) premium is null in all quasi-experimental specifications, suggesting possible selection. The net worth penalty is 28.5 times larger at the 10th percentile of wealth than at the 90th, and the homeownership penalty is concentrated in the first decade after college.

Abstract: How much does homeownership impede interstate migration after job loss, and why has this friction grown? Using approximately 192,000 job-loss episodes from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP, 2001–2024), I document two facts. First, the owner–renter gap in interstate migration after displacement has nearly doubled—from 3.5 to 6 percentage points—despite flat homeownership rates and increasingly liquid housing markets. Second, this widening occurred not during the Global Financial Crisis, when negative equity peaked, but during the Recovery (2013–2019) and COVID+ (2020–2024) eras, when house prices were rising. Triangulating evidence from three empirical approaches—a shift-share labor demand instrument (p < 0.001 under state clustering), cross-state transfer tax variation, and individual-level home values—suggests that persistent transaction costs are an important component of homeowner lock-in. Displaced homeowners who remain immobile experience re-employment rates approximately 10 percentage points lower than movers; this gap is descriptive but motivates the question of whether housing frictions impede labor market adjustment.

Abstract: We examine how a large-scale state development campaign affects family formation by reshaping local labor demand. Prior work suggests that expansions in blue-collar employment can increase marriage and fertility because they create a larger pool of steady, decently paid male earners. We study China’s Third Front construction program—a short-lived but massive effort to relocate and build strategic industrial capacity in the interior—as a setting in which these forces shift sharply and potentially at different horizons. Linking city-level exposure measures to micro data on marriage and births, we document two distinct effects. During the Third Front period, men in more heavily designated areas delay marriage as local manufacturing intensity rises. This pattern contrasts with prior evidence, but is consistent with a temporary deterioration in marriage-market conditions driven by rapid industrial expansion and the resulting shift in the local sex ratio. After the program wanes, the surviving industrial base is associated with higher marriage rates. Overall, the results show that state-led industrialization can generate offsetting, time-varying effects on the marriage market, operating through abrupt changes in local population composition in the short run and improved economic opportunities in the longer run.

Abstract: China’s pre-2016 health insurance system maintained separate programs for urban and rural residents, generating persistent differences in plan generosity, risk pooling, and effective access to care. This paper studies the 2016 reform that integrated urban and rural resident insurance into a unified scheme and expanded benefits, creating a large-scale change in plan design with substantial distributional stakes. I exploit staggered implementation across prefectures and estimate difference-in-differences and event-study models to identify how more generous, more portable coverage affects health care demand and household financial risk exposure. The analysis focuses on outcomes central to modern insurance design debates: utilization (outpatient visits, inpatient admissions, and higher-tier provider use), out-of-pocket spending, catastrophic medical expenditure risk, and precautionary economic behavior. The results indicate that integration primarily operates through financial protection—compressing the right tail of medical spending risk for rural households—while also increasing care-seeking, particularly for groups previously constrained by limited coverage and weak portability such as rural-to-urban migrants. These findings highlight how unifying fragmented insurance can change both the level and distribution of medical spending risk, with implications for universal coverage design and for the role of insurance in reducing inequality and supporting labor mobility.