Previous study by Card and Lewis (2005) has found (puzzling) that inflows of Mexican immigrants into new metropolitan areas have had no effect on the relative wages of very low-skill (high school dropouts). Rather, Mexican workers do affect relative wages for high school graduates. Whereas Card...

This paper examines the effect of a decline in health on the savings and portfolio choice of young, working individuals and the differences between insured and uninsured cohorts using the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that insured individuals are significantly likely...

Since the 1970s, economic restructuring and shifts in industries have morphed the occupational path of workers, curbing socioeconomic mobility for many-wages of African-American workers which have trended upward in the 1960s and 1970s started stalling beginning in the 1980s. As Hispanic/Mexican...

We utilize vehicle registration microdata for all new and used vehicles registered in the U.S. for model years 2010-2022 to study the market for used battery electric vehicles (BEVs). From these records, we establish two stylized facts: 1) BEVs enter the used market at the slowest rate compared...

This paper aims to explain disparities in the charitable bequest behavior of men and women. I use data on charitable bequests in wills from 17th Century Suffolk, England to investigate whether women or men were more generous to the poor when they died. Because of the difference in the legal...

The 2001 recession proved alarming to state government finances. A relatively shallow national recession led to a severe downturn in state revenues that took three years to unwind. In the current economic downturn, early signs of fiscal stress are already apparent. This raises several...

In this paper, we assess the empirical relationship between population growth, mobility, and state-level capital spending in the United States. To evaluate the magnitude of the coefficients, we introduce an explicit, quantitative political-economy model of government spending determination,...

Sales tax holidays (STHs) are the temporary suspension of state (and some local) sales taxes on selected retail items for a brief period of time. The policy has gained popularity in recent years, beginning in one state in 1997 and growing to twenty by 2008. Despite the increased frequency with...

Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

The Earned Income Tax Credit is unique among social programs in that benefits are not paid out evenly across the calendar year. We exploit this feature of the EITC to investigate how the credit influences the food expenditure patterns of eligible households. We find that eligible households...