Dear colleagues, we cordially invite you to our online research seminar (zoom): *** Wednesday, 9th of September, 2020, 4pm Moritz Schularick (University of Bonn) https://www.moritzschularick.com <https://www.moritzschularick.com/> Modigliani meets Minsky: Inequality, Debt and Financial Fragility in America, 1950-2016 Abstract: This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The data show that increased borrowing by middle-class families with low income growth played a central role in rising indebtedness. Debt-to-income ratios have risen most dramatically for households between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the income distribution. While their income growth was low, middle-class families borrowed against the sizable housing wealth gains from rising home prices. Home equity borrowing accounts for about half of the increase in U.S. household debt between the 1970s and 2007. The resulting debt increase made balance sheets more sensitive to income and house price fluctuations and turned the American middle class into the epicenter of growing financial fragility. Please see https://www.jku.at/en/department-of-economics/research/research-events/onlin... <https://www.jku.at/en/department-of-economics/research/research-events/online-economics-research-seminar/> for registration and upcoming presentations. *** Prof. Schularick is Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn, Director of the MacroFinance Lab, and a Principal Investigator in the DFG-Excellence Cluster ECONtribute. He works in the fields of macrofinance, banking and financial stability, as well as international finance, monetary policy and political economy. In 2018, he received the Gossen-Prize of German Economic Association, Germany' s most important prize for economists. He is one of the Managing Editors of Europe’s most important policy journal, Economic Policy, a Fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and an elected Member of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin. *** With best regards, rené böheim We are on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/jku.econ/ <https://www.facebook.com/jku.econ/> ) and twitter (https://twitter.com/jku_econ <https://twitter.com/jku_econ> ). — PD René Böheim, PhD Department of Economics JOHANNES KEPLER UNIVERSITÄT LINZ Altenberger Straße 69 4040 Linz, Österreich P +43-732-2468-7369