How did the largest expansion of unemployment benefits in U.S. history affect household behavior? Using anonymized bank account data covering millions of households, we provide new empirical evidence on the spending and job search responses to benefit changes during the pandemic and compare...

The Regression Kink (RK) design is an increasingly popular empirical method, with more than 20 studies circulated using RK in the last 5 years since the initial circulation of Card, Lee, Pei and Weber (2012). We document empirically that these estimates, which typically use local linear...

The Regression Kink (RK) design is an increasingly popular empirical method, with more than 20 studies circulated using RK in the last 5 years since the initial circulation of Card, Lee, Pei and Weber (2012). We document empirically that these estimates, which typically use local linear...

We use detailed micro data to document a causal response of local retail prices to changes in local 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...

What drives countercyclical volatility? A large literature has documented that many economic variables are more disperse in recessions, but this could either occur because shocks get bigger or because firms respond more to shocks which are the same size. Existing evidence that the dispersion of...

Are there times when durable spending is less responsive to economic stimulus? We argue that aggregate durable expenditures respond more sluggishly to economic shocks during recessions because microeconomic frictions lead to declines in the frequency of households' durable adjustment. We show...

A growing theoretical literature argues that aggregate price flexibility and the inflation-output tradeoff faced by central banks should rise with microeconomic price change dispersion. However, there is little empirical work testing this prediction. I fill this gap by estimating time-varying...