A wide range of costly government policies are designed to extend citizens’ lives and to reduce the risk of premature death. Using economic reasoning, one can evaluate such policies on the basis of efficiency

This paper develops a generalized hedonic model in which an exogenous shock to a single product attribute can affect other attributes, the markets for the product's complements and substitutes, and aggregate quantity produced. These factors are shown to be empirically relevant and to cause bias...

Due to Federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. We use these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

Traditional hedonic estimation approaches are known to be biased when exogenous shocks affect multiple product attributes, the market for the product's complements and substitutes, and aggregate quantity produced. Our research develops a more general hedonic model to recover the marginal...

Due to Federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. I use these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

This paper develops a generalized hedonic model in which an exogenous shock to a single product attribute can affect other attributes, the markets for the product's complements and substitutes, and aggregate quantity produced. These factors are shown to be empirically relevant and to cause bias...

This paper identifies for the first time the impact of borrowing constraints in the recent decline in homeownership rates. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), we measure the combined impact of income, wealth and credit constraints on homeownership outcomes over time. It has...

While a rapidly growing body of research underscores the influence of social capital on financial decisions and economic developments, objective data-based measurements of social capital are lacking. We introduce average credit scores as an indicator of a community's social capital and present...