This paper studies how private equity buyouts create value in higher education, a sector with opaque product quality and intense government subsidy. With novel data on 88 private equity deals involving 994 schools, we show that buyouts lead to higher tuition and per-student debt. Exploiting loan...

Information asymmetries are known in theory to lead to inefficiently low credit provision, yet empirical estimates of the resulting welfare losses are scarce. This paper leverages a randomized experiment conducted by a large fintech lender to estimate welfare losses arising from asymmetric...

The collapse in home prices during the Great Recession triggered a sharp drop in consumer demand by households, leading to massive employment losses. This paper examines the implications of these labor market shocks for the dramatic rise in student loan defaults, which originated during this...

We present both theory and evidence that increased competition may decrease rather than increase consumer welfare in subprime credit markets. We present a model of lending markets with imperfect competition, adverse selection and costly lender screening. In more competitive markets, lenders have...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of financial intermediation and the economic effects of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and novel small business support program that was part of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. We use loan-level...

The 2020 CARES Act directed large cash payments to households. We analyze house-holds' spending responses using high-frequency transaction data from a Fintech non-profit, exploring heterogeneity by income levels, recent income declines, and liquidity as well as linked survey responses about...

We examine how policymakers should react to a pandemic when there is significant uncertainty regarding key parameters relating to the disease. In particular, this paper explores how optimal mitigation policies change when incorporating uncertainty regarding the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) and the...

We explore how household consumption responds to epidemics, utilizing transaction-level household financial data to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 virus. As the number of cases grew, households began to radically alter their typical spending across a number of major categories. Initially...

We study the impact of corporate taxes on barcode-level product prices using linked survey and administrative data. Our empirical strategy exploits the dichotomy between the location of production and the location of sales, providing estimates free from confounding demand shocks. We find...

Human capital can depreciate if skills are unused. But estimating human capital depreciation is challenging, as worker skills are difficult to measure and less productive workers are more likely to spend time in non-employment. We overcome these challenges with new administrative data on...