In 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 212 recalls of toys and other children's products, a sizable increase from previous years. We investigate changes in toy sales following these recalls. We find that for manufacturers that had recalls, unit sales of the types of toys involved...

We examine the impact of recent state-level Medicaid policy changes that expanded eligibility for family planning services to higher-income women and to Medicaid clients whose benefits would expire otherwise. We show that the income-based policy change reduced overall births to non-teens by...

A recent "revisionist" literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an "episodic" event of the first half of the 1980s driven by nonmarket factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the...

In an effort to alleviate the perceived growth of a digital divide, the U.S. government enacted a major subsidy for Internet and communications investment in schools starting in 1998. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of the subsidy-known as the E-Rate-on Internet investment in California...

A large literature shows that the self-employed underreport their income to tax authorities. In this paper, we quantify the extent to which the self-employed also systematically underreport their income in U.S. household surveys. We use the Engel curve describing the relationship between income...

This paper analyzes differences in the likelihood that black and white families become homeowners. By following a sample of black and white renters over time, we are able to separately study racial differences in the likelihood of applying for a mortgage and in the likelihood that a mortgage...

Not properly accounting for differences between business owners and nonbusiness owners in studies of household wealth can lead to erroneous conclusions about the significance of different saving motives. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the 1980s and 1990s, we show that...