Financial expectations of first-year veterinary students.

Objective: To assess student awareness of the financial costs of pursuing a veterinary education, to determine student expectations for financial returns of a veterinary career, and to identify associations between student debt and factors such as future career plans or personality type.

Design: Survey.

Sample: First-year veterinary students at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine.

Heterogeneity and Risk Sharing in Village Economies.

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households' risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is substantial, statistically significant heterogeneity in estimated risk preferences.

Interstate migration has fallen less than you think: consequences of hot deck imputation in the current population survey.

We show that much of the recent reported decrease in interstate migration is a statistical artifact. Before 2006, the Census Bureau's imputation procedure for dealing with missing data in the Current Population Survey inflated the estimated interstate migration rate. An undocumented change in the procedure corrected the problem starting in 2006, thus reducing the estimated migration rate.

Heterogeneous Risk Preferences and the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles.

I study the welfare cost of business cycles in a complete-markets economy where some people are more risk averse than others. Relatively more risk-averse people buy insurance against aggregate risk, and relatively less risk-averse people sell insurance. These trades reduce the welfare cost of business cycles for everyone.