Unemployed households' access to unsecured revolving credit more than tripled over the last three decades. This paper analyzes how both cyclical fluctuations and trend increases in credit access impact the business cycle. The main quantitative result is that credit expansions and contractions...

The effect of coworkers on the learning and the productivity of an individual is measured combining theory and data. The theory is a frictional equilibrium model of the labor market in which production and the accumulation of human capital of an individual are allowed to depend on the human...

We develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market that we use to measure the macroeconomic implications of labor market power. Strategic interaction complicates inference of parameters that are key to this exercise. To address this challenge, we...

Theoretically, monopsony power of the firms relative to their workers can come in many forms, each causing wages to be less than marginal revenue products of labor, but each having different welfare and policy implications. These include worker-firm specific amenities, search frictions, the...

How does consumer credit access impact job flows, earnings, and entrepreneurship? To answer this question, we build a new administrative dataset which links individual employment and entrepreneur tax records to TransUnion credit reports, and we exploit the discrete increase in consumer credit...

To measure labor market power in the US economy, we develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market. We estimate key model parameters by matching the firm-level relationship between labor market share and employment size and wage responses to state...

This paper documents the abnormally slow recovery in the labor market during the Great Recession, and analyzes how mortgage modification policies contributed to delayed recovery. By making modifications means-tested by reducing mortgage payments based on a borrower's current income, these...

Through a purely positive lens, we study and document the growing trend of mortgagors who skip mortgage payments as an extra source of "informal" unemployment insurance during the 2007 recession and the subsequent recovery. In a dynamic model, we capture this behavior by treating both...

This paper documents the abnormally slow recovery in the labor market during the Great Recession and analyzes how mortgage modification policies contributed to delayed recovery. By making modifications means-tested by reducing mortgage payments based on a borrower's current income, these...

How do job losers use default -- a phenomenon 6x more prevalent than bankruptcy -- as a type of "informal" unemployment insurance, and more importantly, what are the social costs and benefits of this behavior? To this end, I establish several new facts: (i) job loss is the main reason for...