Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Earnings Risk And The U.S. Housing Market, Phillip Oberg

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to develop, refine, and employ empirical measures of earnings risk—especially permanent risk—and determine their effect on behavior, with applications specific to the recent mortgage bubble.

Chapter 1 aims to identify covariates of risks associated with permanent and temporary earnings shocks. The distinction is significant both because permanent shocks are more consequential and because measurement error would contaminate only measures of temporary risks. Generalizing methods used in previous work, we allow risk to vary both across individuals and over individuals’ careers, so they could be used to study behavioral responses to risk even with individual …