The government is facing a severe shortage of skilled workers. The conventional wisdom in branches of policy and public administration is that the shortage is driven by low salaries that are not competitive for attracting top talent. Using longitudinal data on high skilled workers between 1993...

Abstract This paper explores the causal effect of foreclosure on individual well-being and social capital. Using plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of interest rate changes on different types of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), we find that a 10% rise in foreclosures is associated with...

We exploit the staggered and discontinuous changes in interest rates among adjustable rate mortgages to identify the effects of foreclosures independently of housing prices. First, interest rate resets predict foreclosure, accounting for up to 18% of the change in foreclosures. Second, a 10%...

Does high leverage incentivize banks to systematically originate and hold riskier loans? I construct a novel data set consisting of 3 million small business and home mortgage loans, matched to the specific banks that originated them and verified to be held on bank portfolios, rather than sold. I...

In 2009, the Seventh Circuit ruled in U.S. v. Apex Oil that certain types of injunctions requiring firms to clean up previously released toxic chemicals were not dischargeable in bankruptcy. This was widely perceived to represent a split with Sixth Circuit precedent, although Supreme Court cert...

Over six million households experienced foreclosure during the financial crisis. Where did they move, how did they fare, and why? First, we create a new longitudinal dataset between 2006 and 2011 from households' date of foreclosure to their relocation. Despite significant heterogeneity in...

A Special Purpose Acquisition Company (“SPAC”) is a publicly listed firm with a two-year lifespan during which it is expected to find a private company with which to merge and thereby bring public. SPACs have been touted as a cheaper way to go public than an IPO. This paper analyzes the...

Scholars frequently assert that financial legislation in the U.S. is primarily driven by financial crises. This ‘crisis legislation hypothesis’ is often cited as an explanation for various supposed shortcomings of US financial legislation, including that it is ill-conceived and inadequate to...

In this Essay, we revisit our analysis in A Sober Look at SPACs and assess whether that analysis—based on the 47 SPACs that merged between January 2019 and June 2020—provided a basis on which to predict that the dilution embedded in the SPAC structure would lead to severe shareholder losses...

SPACs have been evolving recently in ways that make them even more expensive vehicles to take companies public, and thus in ways that will likely lead to even worse returns for shareholders who hold their shares through SPAC mergers. Each of the changes is designed to allow sponsors to continue...