
December 1, 2024 - Article
A new study of German and Swedish data finds that mens earnings increase following a couples move to a new commuting zone, while womens earnings stay the same or decline at the outset. Couples are also more likely to relocate when a man is laid off than after a woman is. These findings suggest that...
September 2024 - Working Paper32970 Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouses career or the others. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. We first conduct an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones and find that relocation increases mens earnings more than...
April 2024 - Working Paper32376 In 2020, local governments in China began issuing digital coupons to stimulate spending in targeted categories such as restaurants and supermarkets. Using data from a large e-commerce platform and a bunching estimation approach, we find that the coupons caused large increases in spending of 3.13.3...
February 2024 - Working Paper32110 We leverage spatial variation in the severity of the Great Recession across the United States to examine its impact on mortality and to explore implications for the welfare consequences of recessions. We estimate that an increase in the unemployment rate of the magnitude of the Great Recession...
May 2021 - Working Paper28838 This paper develops a theory of commodity taxation with love-of-variety preferences and endogenous firm entry and exit. We consider a framework that encompasses a wide range of firm conduct and derive formulas for efficiency and pass-through of specific and ad valorem taxes. These formulas unify...

October 29, 2020 - Article
Football and basketball, which attract many players from lower-income backgrounds, subsidize money-losing sports which are often played by more affluent athletes. S trict limitations on player compensation in revenue-generating college sports such as mens football and basketball result in a transfer...
October 2020 - Working Paper27924 This paper develops a search-and-matching model that incorporates temporary unemployment and applies the model to study the labor market dynamics of the COVID-19 recession in the US. We calibrate the model using panel data from the Current Population Survey for 2001-2019, and we find that the model...
August 2020 - Working Paper27734 Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by mens football and mens basketball programs. We characterize...
June 2020 - Working Paper27437 This paper highlights a previously-unnoticed property of commonly-used discrete choice models, which is that they feature parallel demand curves. Specifically, we show that in random utility models, inverse aggregate demand curves shift in parallel with respect to variety if and only if the random...
June 2020 - Working Paper27409 This paper studies commodity taxation in a model featuring heterogeneous consumers, imperfect competition, and tax salience. We derive new formulas for the incidence and marginal excess burden of commodity taxation, and we find that tax salience and market structure interact when considering tax...

December 1, 2019 - Article
Means testing, income limits, higher fees, and more paperwork for bankruptcy filings all contributed to the decline, especially among lower-income households. Responding to a five-fold increase in consumer bankruptcy filings from 0.3 percent of households annually in the early 1980s to 1.5 percent...
October 2019 - Working Paper26289 We use comprehensive patient-level discharge data to study the effect of Medicaid on the use of hospital services. Our analysis relies on cross-state variation in the Affordable Care Acts Medicaid expansion, along with within-state variation across ZIP Codes in exposure to the expansion. We find...

October 1, 2019 - Article
The share of unemployed individuals who are "long-term unemployed" that is, unemployed for 26 weeks or longer surged to record highs in the United States during the Great Recession. Figure 1 decomposes the overall unemployment rate into three groups short-, medium-, and long-term unemployed and...
September 2019 - Working Paper26254 A more generous consumer bankruptcy system provides greater insurance against financial risks, but it may also raise the cost of credit to consumers. We study this trade-off using the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which raised the costs of filing for...
November 2018 - Working Paper25236 We compare patterns of unemployment and joblessness between Canada and the U.S. during the Great Recession. Similar to previous findings for the U.S. in Kroft et al. [2016], we document a rise in long-term unemployment in Canada. This increase is not accounted for by changes in the observable...
May 2018 - Working Paper24652 This paper develops a framework for evaluating the welfare impact of various interventions designed to increase take-up of social safety net programs in the presence of potential behavioral biases. We calibrate the key parameters using a randomized field experiment in which 30,000 elderly...
August 2017 - Working Paper23718 Health insurance confers benefits to the previously uninsured, including improvements in health, reductions in out-of-pocket spending, and reduced medical debt. But because the nominally uninsured pay only a small share of their medical expenses, health insurance also provides substantial transfers...
October 27, 2016 - Chapter
August 2016 - Working Paper22518 This paper estimates how the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) varies over the business cycle by exploiting exogenous variation in credit card borrowing limits. Ten years after an individual declares Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the record of the bankruptcy is removed from her credit report, generating...
May 2016 - Working Paper22288 We examine some economic impacts of hospital admissions using an event study approach in two datasets: survey data from the Health and Retirement Study, and hospital admissions data linked to consumer credit reports. We report estimates of the impact of hospital admissions on out-of-pocket medical...
November 2015 - Working Paper21762 We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. We find winning a lottery prize modestly reduces labor earnings, with the reduction being immediate, persistent, and similar by age, education, and sex. A...

October 5, 2015 - Article
Each newly uninsured person leads to nearly $900 in uncompensated care costs, of which hospitals absorb approximately two thirds as lost profits. When patients can't or won't pay for hospital care, who picks up the tab? During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, many proponents argued that...
September 2015 - Working Paper21587 We study how the recent national housing boom and bust affected college enrollment and attainment during the 2000s. We exploit cross-city variation in local housing booms, and use a variety of data sources and empirical methods, including models that use plausibly exogenous variation in housing...
June 2015 - Working Paper21290 American hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to the uninsured. We use previously confidential hospital financial data to study the resulting uncompensated care, medical care for which no payment is received. We use both panel-data methods and case studies from state-wide...
July 2014 - Working Paper20273 We explore the extent to which composition, duration dependence, and labor force non-participation can account for the sharp increase in the incidence of long-term unemployment (LTU) during the Great Recession. We first show that compositional shifts in demographics, occupation, industry, region,...
October 1, 2013 - Article
There is a powerful work disincentive from public health insurance eligibility....
August 1, 2013 - Article
The positive labor market effects of the temporary housing boom 'masked' the negative effect of the decline in manufacturing that otherwise would have been more evident in the mid-2000s. In...
July 2013 - Working Paper19220 We study the effect of public health insurance eligibility on labor supply by exploiting the largest public health insurance disenrollment in the history of the United States. In 2005, approximately 170,000 Tennessee residents abruptly lost public health insurance coverage. Using both across- and...
April 2013 - Working Paper18949 We study the extent to which manufacturing decline and local housing booms contributed to changes in labor market outcomes during the 2000s, focusing primarily on the distributional consequences across geographical areas and demographic groups. Using a local labor markets design, we estimate that...
March 1, 2013 - Article
The likelihood of receiving a callback for a job interview sharply declines with unemployment duration. According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, long-term unemployment may "produce a self-perpetuating cycle wherein protracted spells of unemployment heighten employers'...
September 2012 - Working Paper18387 This paper studies the role of employer behavior in generating "negative duration dependence" -- the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell -- by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities. Our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an...
June 1, 2012 - Article
Some households do not have the liquid assets that are needed to cover the costs of bankruptcy filing; receiving tax rebates provided the needed liquidity. Over the past three decades, consumer bankruptcy rates have tripled. As of the late 1990s, nearly 10 percent of American households had declared...
February 2012 - Working Paper17807 This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates...
June 2011 - Working Paper17173 We study how the level of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits that trades off the consumption smoothing benefit with the moral hazard cost of distorting job search behavior varies over the business cycle. Empirically, we find that the moral hazard cost is procyclical, greater when the unemployment...
June 2011 - Working Paper17167 Low-skill workers are comparatively immobile: when labor demand slumps in a city, low-skill workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. This paper estimates the extent to which (falling) housing prices and (rising) social transfers can account for this...
February 2009 - Working Paper14744 Health expenditures as a share of GDP have more than tripled over the last half century. A common conjecture is that this is primarily a consequence of rising real per capita income, which more than doubled over the same period. We investigate this hypothesis empirically by instrumenting for local...
June 2008 - Working Paper14089 We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health and...
September 2007 - Working Paper13422 This paper uses the random assignment of playing partners in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that the ability of playing partners affects the performance of professional golfers, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace...