What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the...

We examine the within- and across-firm shipment decisions of tens of thousands of goods-producing and goods-distributing establishments. This allows us to quantify the normally unobservable forces that determine firm boundaries; that is, which transactions are mediated by ownership control, as...

This paper examines the relationship between the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and bank branching patterns, measured by the risk of branch closure and the net loss of branches at the neighborhood level, in the aftermath of Great Recession. Between 2009 and 2017, there was a larger decline in...

We investigate cyclicality of variance and skewness of household labor income risk using PSID data. There are five main findings. First, we find that head's labor income exhibits countercyclical variance and procyclical skewness. Second, the cyclicality of hourly wages is muted, suggesting that...

This paper studies the link between credit availability and student loan repayment using administrative federal student loan data. We demonstrate that expansions and contractions in federal student loan credit to institutions with high default rates explain most of the time series variation in...

Infrequent but turbulent overt sovereign defaults on domestic creditors are a "forgotten history" in macroeconomics. We propose a heterogeneous-agents model in which the government chooses optimal debt and default on domestic and foreign creditors by balancing distributional incentives versus...

We document that postwar U.S. elections show a strong pattern of "incumbency disadvantage": If a party has held the presidency of the country or the governorship of a state for some time, that party tends to lose popularity in the subsequent election. We show that this fact can be explained by a...

Growth-oriented entrepreneurial start-ups generate more economic growth than other self-employed businesses, yet they only constitute a small fraction of start-ups. We examine whether financial constraints impede these types of start-ups by exploiting lottery wins as exogenous wealth shocks. We...

Following the 2008 financial crisis, mortgage credit tightened and banks lost significant mortgage market share to nonbank lenders, including to fintech firms recently. Have fintech firms expanded credit access, or are their customers similar to those of traditional lenders? Unlike in small...

We study how banks' exposure to a sovereign crisis gets transmitted onto the corporate sector. To do so we use data on the universe of banks and firms in Argentina during the crisis of 2001. We build a model characterized by matching frictions in which firms establish (long-term) relationships...