We introduce a new measure of social connectedness between U.S. county-pairs, as well as between U.S. counties and foreign countries. Our measure, which we call the "Social Connectedness Index" (SCI), is based on the number of friendship links on Facebook, the world's largest online social...

This paper studies how the impact of monetary policy depends on the distribution of savings from refinancing mortgages. We show that the efficacy of monetary policy is state dependent, varying in a systematic way with the pool of potential savings from refinancing. We construct a quantitative...

In this paper, we provide direct evidence on the behavior of markups in the retail sector across space and time. Markups are measured using gross margins. We consider three levels of aggregation: the retail sector as a whole, the firm level, and the product level. We find that: (1) markups are...

We document two facts. First, during the Great Recession, consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. When households traded down, labor demand fell, increasing...

We use U.S. household-level bank account data to investigate the heterogeneous effects of the pandemic on spending and savings. Households across the income distribution all cut spending from March to early April. Since mid April, spending has rebounded most rapidly for low-income households. We...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users' cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends' new phone acquisitions...

We study the impact on the skill premium of increases in the quality of goods consumed by households (“trading up”). Our empirical work shows that high- quality goods are more intensive in skilled labor than low-quality goods and that household spending on high-quality goods rises with...

This paper explores the relationship between shelf prices and manufacturers' coupons for 25 ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Contrary to the predictions of static monopoly price discrimination, we find the shelf prices for a particular brand in a particular city are generally lower during periods...

We compare outcomes obtained by sellers who listed their home on a newly developed For-Sale-By-Owner (FSBO) web site versus those who used an agent and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). We do not find support for the hypothesis that listing on the MLS helps sellers obtain a significantly...

In this paper I analyze GMM estimation when the sample is not a random draw from the population of interest. I exploit auxiliary information, in the form of moments from the population of interest, in order to compute weights that are proportional to the inverse probability of selection. The...