Household heterogeneity and financial decision-making Three essays on housing, risk, and retirement

Households make a handful of financial decisions that shape their lives for decades: whether to move house, when to retire, whether to insure against disaster. How a household weighs them depends on its income and wealth, and on the taxes and public insurance programs it faces. This dissertation builds quantitative models to study these decisions and the policies that surround them. Chapter 2 shows that replacing the Dutch property transfer tax with a recurring property tax increases residential mobility and welfare. Chapter 3 demonstrates that older workers spend less out of a windfall than retirees because they use part of it to retire earlier. Chapter 4 reveals that access to liquidity after a flood, rather than underestimation of risk, explains low insurance take-up in the United States.