The recent U.S. consumption boom and the subsequent surge in mortgage defaults have been linked to mortgage equity withdrawals (MEWs). MEWs are correlated with covariates consistent with a permanent income framework augmented for credit-constraints. Nevertheless, many households are financially...

Texas is the only US state that limits home equity borrowing to 80 percent of home value. This paper exploits this policy discontinuity around the Texas’ interstate borders and uses a multidimensional regression discontinuity design framework to find that limits on home equity borrowing in...

Studies that estimate the Phillips curve for the U.S. use mainly national-level data and find mixed evidence of nonlinearity, with some recent studies either rejecting nonlinearity or estimating only modest convexity. In addition, most studies do not make a distinction between the relative...

Very few existing studies have estimated female labor supply elasticities using a U.S. panel data set, though cross-sectional studies abound. Also, most existing studies have modeled female labor supply in the U.S. in a static framework. I make an attempt to fill the gap in this literature, by...

Employer matching of employee 401(k) contributions can provide a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension-plan design in the United States. Using detailed administrative contribution, earnings, and pension-plan data from the Health and Retirement Study, this...

A key parameter in economics is the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS), which measures the extent to which consumers shift total expenditures across time in response to changes in the effective rate of return. In contrast to the previous literature, which primarily has relied on...

Econometric models with nonlinear budgets sets frequently arise in the study of impact of taxation on labor supply. Blomquist and Newey (2002) have suggested a nonparametric method to estimate the uncompensated wage and income effects when the budget set is nonlinear. This paper extends their...