Title charges include title insurance premiums and charges for settling a loan. Title charges vary considerably from a median of $1,971 in California to $625 in North Dakota. This report analyzes variation in settlement costs using data from over 3,000 FHA-insured, 30-year fixed-rate home...

Using new nationally representative data from the National Financial Capability State-by-State Survey, this paper examines the relationship between state-level alternative financial service (AFS) policies (prohibitions, price caps, disclosures) and consumer use of five AFS products: payday...

How do private transfers differ by race and ethnicity and do such differences explain the racial and ethnic disparity in wealth? Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines private transfers by race and ethnicity and explores a causal relationship between private transfers and...

Long run labor market trends in the American economy pose significant challenges. The employment-to-population ratio has steadily fallen. Growth in real money wages has been slow, with the most rapid gains taking place among workers at the top of the earnings distribution. One source of these...

James Buchanan, one of the founders of public choice theory and constitutional economics, began his career studying fiscal federalism in the doctoral program at the University of Chicago. This paper explores Buchanan’s early interest in Australian experiences with federation and...

In his 1962 NBER volume, Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and misinformation. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or...