Conference Agenda

Using high-frequency household-level data—including more than 700 billionaires—I study heterogeneous responses to capital gains taxation. Wealthier households realize more losses and fewer gains, consistent with more effective tax management. A regression kink design shows that this pattern reflects active tax optimization at the top, driven largely by sophisticated financial advisors. Annual tax expenses decline from 1.1% at the bottom to 40 basis points at the top, generating a 70-basis-point tax alpha that is comparable in magnitude to the pre-tax return gap on risky assets estimated in prior work. These differences have sizable effects on the long-run wealth distribution.

We study how changes in housing wealth affect household spending using administrative and granular, de-identified, data on debit card payments and e-invoices for the near population of Norway. We focus on the 2014 oil-price collapse, which created sharpregional variation in house prices. Comparing government workers in oil and non-oil regions, we estimate a three-year marginal propensity to spend (MPX) of about 3.6 cents per dollar. The response is highly concentrated in durables, home improvements, furnishings, and vehicles, and primarily driven by a reduction in the uptake of credit backed by home-equity. The local MPX (L-MPX), the share of the total spending response accruing to locally produced goods and services, stands for roughly 80% of the consumption decline. Additional findings highlight both collateral and wealth effects as key channels linking housing wealth to consumption, and document that household balance-sheet heterogeneity shapes the propagation of housing-wealth shocks.

Adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) transmit monetary policy less directly than often assumed. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in ARM rate reset timing in Portugal---where over 92% of mortgages are indexed to Euribor---around the ECB’s 2022–2023 tightening cycle to estimate responses to mortgage payment shocks. After reset dates, mortgage renegotiations increase by 10 percentage points, lender switching by 4, partial prepayments by 5, and full prepayments by 3, offsetting about 17% of the payment increase implied by policy rates. Responses occur only immediately after resets, consistent with selective inattention, and are largest among younger, more educated, and higher-balance borrowers. Supply-side factors amplify these effects: as rates rise and bank competition intensifies, households at more flexible banks renegotiate, switch lenders, and prepay more, while greater broker presence further increases lender switching. Our findings suggest that monetary policy pass-through in ARM-dominated markets depends on borrower behavior, market frictions, and sticky deposit rates.