The recent episode of rising consumer bankruptcy and increasing foreclosure rates has sparked a lively debate about how to best tackle the crisis in the U.S. housing market. This paper contributes to the debate by providing an explicit model of the interactions of households' decisions to...

I use detailed data from an online financial management service to analyze the extent to which short-run impatience can explain why people hold expensive credit card balances. I first measure the sensitivity of consumption spending to paycheck receipt for each user and argue that it provides a...

We use data from eBay to identify hundreds of thousands of instances in which retailers posted otherwise identical product listings with targeted variation in pricing and auction design. We use these matched listings to measure the dispersion in auction prices for identical goods sold by the...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

We use detailed micro data to document a causal response of local retail price to changes in house prices, with elasticities of 15%-20% across housing booms and busts. Notably, these price responses are largest in zip codes with many homeowners, and non-existent in zip codes with mostly renters....

This paper documents stylized facts on buyer and seller behavior across different segments of the housing market, and uses them to inform a search model with heterogeneous houses.

Do increases in wealth driven by house price growth lead to changes in customer shopping and firms' price-setting behavior? We link disaggregated microdata from various sources to construct zip-code level measures of retail prices, house prices, and customer shopping. We find that there is a...

Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act in the United States. Using a unique panel data set covering over 150 million credit card accounts, we find that regulatory limits on credit card fees reduced overall borrowing costs to consumers by an annualized 2.8% of average daily...

This paper studies housing markets with multiple segments searched by heterogeneous clienteles. We document market and search activity for the San Francisco Bay Area. Variation within narrow geographic areas is large and differs significantly from variation across those areas. In particular,...