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How do households respond to job loss, and which self-insurance channels are most important? By linking customer data from the largest bank in Denmark with information from government administrative registers, we quantify a broad range of responses to job loss in a unified empirical framework. Two response margins stand out: during the first 24 months after job loss, households reduce spending by 30% of the income loss while reduced saving in liquid assets accounts for 50%. Other response margins highlighted in the literature - spousal labor supply, private transfers, home equity extraction, mortgage refinancing, and consumer credit - are less important.

This paper documents a large association between individuals' time discounting in incentivized experiments and their positions in the real-life wealth distribution derived from Danish high-quality administrative data for a large sample of middle-aged individuals. The association is stable over time, exists through the wealth distribution and remains large after controlling for education, income profile, school grades, initial wealth, parental wealth, credit constraints, demographics, risk preferences, and additional behavioral parameters. Our results suggest that savings behavior is a driver of the observed association between patience and wealth inequality as predicted by standard savings theory. (JEL C91, D15, D31, E21)