This paper uses insights from behavioral economics to explain a particularly surprising borrowing phenomenon: one in six undergraduate students offered interest-free loans turns them down. Models of impulse control predict that students may optimally reject subsidized loans to avoid excessive...

This paper demonstrates that low-skilled Mexican-born immigrants' location choices in the U.S. respond strongly to changes in local labor demand, and that this geographic elasticity helps equalize spatial differences in labor market outcomes for low-skilled native workers, who are much less...

This paper demonstrates that immigration decisions depend on local labor market conditions by documenting the change in low-skilled immigrant inflows in response to supply increases among the US-born. Using prereform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor...

This paper investigates the local labor supply effects of changes to the minimum wage by examining the response of low-skilled immigrants’ location decisions. Canonical models emphasize the importance of labor mobility when evaluating the employment effects of the minimum wage; yet few studies...

Our analysis so far has shown some interesting results. In particular, we find that the supply of unsecured credit to the households who filed for bankruptcy more than two years before is lower than that to the households with similar credit scores but no bankruptcy records on their credit...

An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which...

Households that fail to refinance their mortgage when interest rates decline can lose out on substantial savings. Based on a large random sample of outstanding U.S. mortgages in December of 2010, we estimate that approximately 20% of households for whom refinancing would be optimal and who...

While extreme concentrations of poor racial minorities, briefly `rediscovered' as a social problem by media in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, declined significantly in the 1990s, no research has determined whether the trend reduced exposure to poor neighbourhoods over time or changed racial gaps...

This paper investigates the impact of lower mortgage rates on household balance sheets and other economic outcomes during the housing crisis. We use proprietary loan-level panel data matched to consumer credit records using borrowers' Social Security numbers, which allows for accurate...

We examine the consequences of existing regulations on the quality of mortgage loans originations in the originate-to-distribute (OTD) market. The information asymmetries in the OTD market can lead to moral hazard problems on the part of lenders. We find, using a plausibly exogenous source of...