Essays in inequality, risk-sharing and the lifecycle

This dissertation comprises three essays that are linked by their focus on inequality and risk-sharing over the lifecycle.;In Chapter 1, "Inequality and the Lifecycle", I assess whether individual productivity shocks can account for observed lifecycle patterns of inequality in wages, labor supply and consumption, when the only available risk-sharing mechanism is self-insurance through borrowing and savings.;In Chapter 2, "How Much Insurance In Bewley Models?", I use the same environment to compare households' consumption responses to income shocks, to corresponding evidence from US data. A finding that emerges from these first two chapters is that in the data, younger households have access to more insurance channels than this class of models predicts.;In Chapter 3, "Moving Back Home: Insurance Against Labor Market Risk", I delve deeper into the micro-foundations of the additional insurance possibilities observed for young workers, by focusing on one informal insurance channel that can shed light on observed behavior of young adults: the option to live with their parents. I construct a new panel data set of parent-youth coresidence and document an empirical relationship between youths' movements in and out of their parents' homes and idiosyncratic labor market events. I then use this dataset to estimate the structural parameters of a model of parent-youth coresidence, financial transfers, labor supply and savings. On the basis of simulations from this model, I argue that the option to move in and out of the parental home is a quantitatively valuable channel of insurance against labor market risk for low-skilled workers.