This project investigates how differences across households and firms shape aggregate macroeconomic outcomes—a frontier question in modern macroeconomics. High-performance computing is essential for solving the complex models required to analyze these heterogeneous agent economies, enabling research that has generated multiple academic publications and policy-relevant insights. Research Agenda Strand 1: Household Heterogeneity and Economic Recessions I examine how household-level decisions amplify or dampen aggregate shocks during major recessions. For the Great Recession, I quantify a novel mechanism: declining job separations between the 1980s and 2007 altered household sorting across labor and asset markets, leaving many families underinsured when the crisis struck. This reallocation of asset holdings helps explain the recession's unusual severity. The COVID-19 recession offers a contrasting natural experiment with a clearly identified shock. I analyze how households updated their expectations about the pandemic's economic duration and severity, revealed through their consumption and saving decisions during 2020-2022. Related work examines international housing market responses to monetary policy during this period, showing how cross-country differences in mortgage contracts (fixed versus variable rates, refinancing costs) explain divergent outcomes across economies. Strand 2: Human Capital Accumulation and Gender Equality This research traces how long-run structural changes reshape labor markets and human capital formation. One project quantifies how reduced discrimination barriers enabled high-ability women to exit teaching for other professions over the past fifty years, with significant implications for aggregate productivity and economic growth. A second project examines whether new workplace technologies—remote work and artificial intelligence—can reduce gender inequality by making "greedy occupations" (high-paying jobs demanding long, inflexible hours) more compatible with family responsibilities. Since childcare duties fall disproportionately on women, these technologies may fundamentally alter occupational sorting and narrow gender wage gaps in both the short and long run. Strand 3: Portfolio Choice in Non-Linear Economies The rise of low-cost index funds has transformed household investment, with profound implications for corporate governance and asset pricing. While passive investing reduces transaction costs, it also makes shareholders less responsive to individual firm performance. This research develops a frontier heterogeneous-agent model to study these portfolio choice dynamics. Crucially, the problem depends fundamentally on aggregate risk and therefore cannot be analyzed using standard linear approximation methods. Instead, I employ cutting-edge computational techniques to solve these high-dimensional models with fully non-linear dynamics—work impossible without HPC resources. Computational Requirements These projects require solving large-scale heterogeneous agent models with rich individual state spaces, aggregate uncertainty, and non-linear dynamics. HPC access enables the iterative solution methods, Monte Carlo simulations, and robustness checks essential for credible quantitative macroeconomic research. This project extends my previous SNIC allocation, which focused on the Great Recession strand, to encompass my broader research agenda on household heterogeneity.