While the elasticity of housing supply has served as a popular instrument for inferring the causal effect of housing price growth on economic outcomes, concerns about the exclusion restriction have emerged. We introduce a methodology for creating instruments using the pre-existing supply of...

This paper studies how shocks to the social network can have aggregate effects. First, using daily consumption data across counties over the COVID-19 pandemic and Facebook's Social Connectedness Index (SCI), we find that a 10% rise in SCI-weighted cases and deaths is associated with a 0.18% and...

This paper investigates the causal effect of economic sentiment on consumption using micro-data between 2008 and 2017. After showing that individuals update their beliefs about the national state of the economic in response to local housing and labor market fluctuations, I use the Social...