Using loan-level data on millions of used-car transactions across hundreds of lenders, we study the consumer response to exogenous variation in credit terms. Borrowers offered shorter maturity decrease expenditures enough to offset 60-90% of the monthly payment increase. Most of this is driven...

While popular with policymakers, most evidence on consumer financial disclosure's effectiveness studies borrowing decisions (where optimality is unclear) or lab experiments (where attention is not scarce). We provide field evidence from randomized-controlled trials with 124,000 savings-account...

In this paper, we provide evidence of the importance of monthly payments in the market for consumer installment debt. Auto debt in particular has grown rapidly since the Great Recession and has eclipsed credit cards in total debt outstanding. Auto-loan maturities have also increased such that...

Since the advent of heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, several papers have proposed adjustments to the original White formulation. We replicate earlier findings that each of these adjusted estimators performs quite poorly in finite samples. We propose a class of alternative...

Understanding potential spillovers from the attributes and actions of neighborhood residents onto the value of surrounding properties and neighborhoods is central to both the theory of urban economics and the development of efficient housing policy. This paper measures the capitalization of...

We establish two underappreciated facts about costly search. First, unless demand is perfectly inelastic, search frictions can result in significant deadweight loss by decreasing consumption. Second, whenever cross-price elasticities are non-zero, costly search in one market also affects...

We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group-level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor (1981). Because of the presence of group-level unobservables, standard quantile...

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to family and jobs. An...

The popular quantile regression estimator of Koenker and Bassett (1978) is biased if there is an additive error term. Approaching this problem as an errors-in-variables problem where the dependent variable suffers from classical measurement error, we present a sieve maximum-likelihood approach...

Despite massive large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) by central banks around the world since the global financial crisis, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether and how these programs affect the real economy. Using rich borrower-linked mortgage-market data, we document that there is a...