An oft-touted benefit of homeownership is the ability to build and access equity, and in recent years the amount of "tappable" home equity held by US homeowners has reached historic levels. But more than one-quarter of recent applications for mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW) loan products were...

We study the impact of the 1930s HOLC residential security maps on experienced segregation based on cell phone records which track visits out of and into home neighborhoods. We compare adjacent neighborhoods, one of which was assigned a lower grade for creditworthiness than the other. We use a...

Low-income and Black households are less likely to visit bank branches than high-income and White households, despite the former two groups appearing to rely more on branches as means of bank participation. We assess whether unequal branch access can explain that disparity. We propose a measure...

We show that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), from its inception in the 1930s, did not insure mortgages in low income urban neighborhoods where the vast majority of urban Black Americans lived. The agency evaluated neighborhoods using block-level information collected by New Deal relief...

Economists' principal explanations of the subprime crisis differ from those developed by noneconomists in that the latter see it as rooted in the US legacy of racial/ethnic inequality, and especially in racial residential segregation, whereas the former ignore race. This paper traces this...

Use of public assistance by noncitizens is controversial. Before 2018, institutionalization and receipt of cash benefits were considered as evidence of whether immigrants were likely to become a "public charge" and, therefore, ineligible for citizenship. But a new rule-proposed in 2018 and...

This paper analyzes earnings inequality and earnings dynamics in Sweden over 1985- 2016. The deep recession in the early 1990s marks a historic turning point with a massive increase in earnings inequality and earnings volatility, and the impact of the recession and the recovery from it lasted...

We investigate whether exposure to immigrant peers at school affects natives' future interactions with ethnic minorities. Identification is based on variation in immigrant exposure across cohorts within school catchment areas in Sweden. We document that natives respond to immigrants by changing...

We study the role of firm productivity in explaining earnings disparities between immigrants and natives using population-wide matched employer-employee data from Sweden. We find substantial earnings returns to working in firms with higher persistent productivity, with greater gains for...

We study the impact of asylum waiting, exploiting a rapid increase in processing times for asylum seekers to Sweden in 2014. Longer waiting slows down the integration process and affects labor market outcomes for an extended period. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after...