We analyze the extent to which US federal aid to state and local governments during the COVID-19 pandemic had effects that spilled over across state lines. We find that federal assistance had a positive overall effect on state and local government employment that stems largely from the direct...

President Biden rejects the economics-driven antitrust policies of the past 40 years. Flanked by his White House competition adviser and his new FTC Chair in July 2021, he asserted that the "experiment failed" and promised to return to earlier antitrust traditions. This report shows those...

We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, DC civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. Using a within-block identification strategy, we show that destruction caused lots to remain vacant for the next...

Without Congressional action, the recently released National Academy of Sciences report, "An Updated Measure of Poverty: (Re)Drawing the Line," could have substantial effects on government program eligibility and spending—if its recommendation to "redraw the line" is implemented by the Census...

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of default risk for newly originated home purchase loans since 1990. We bring together several data sources to produce this history, including loan-level data for the entire GSE book. We use these data to track a large number of loan...

Theories that predict u-shaped and inverse u-shaped relationships are ubiquitous throughout the social sciences. As a result of this widespread interest in identifying non-monotonic relationships in data and the well-known problems with standard parametric approaches based on quadratic...

This paper describes one of the first attempts to gauge the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global trajectory of real GDP over the course of 2020 and 2021. It is also among the first efforts to distinguish between the role of domestic variables and global trade in transmitting the...