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 examine the quantitative impact of the Federal Reserve's mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchase program. We focus on how much of the recent decline in mortgage interest rate spreads can be attributed to these purchases. The question is more difficult than frequently perceived because of...

We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

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...