American women tend to be less financially literate than men, which is consistent with a household division of labor in which men manage finances. However, women also tend to outlive their husbands, so they will eventually need to take over this task. Using a new survey of older couples, I find...

We examine the interplay of the economy and state and local budgets by developing and examining two measures of fiscal policy: the high-employment budget and fiscal impetus. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in cyclical GDP results in a 0.1 percentage point increase in NIPA-based net...

The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act of 2003 has been described as textbook fiscal stimulus. Using household survey data on the self-reported qualitative response to the tax cuts, we estimate that the boost to aggregate personal consumption expenditures from the child credit...

This study examines the effect of shocks observed in financial markets on output and employment during the Great Depression. We present three main findings. First, an adverse financial shock leads to a decline in the manufacturing sector's output and employment that peaks about 11 months...

Are consumers who have filed for personal bankruptcy before excluded from the unsecured credit market? Using a unique data set of credit card mailings, we directly explore the supply of unsecured credit to consumers with the most conspicuous default risk--those with a bankruptcy history. On...

This paper employs Roback's locational-equilibrium model of public-goods pricing, cross-sectional data from the Census of Population and Housing, and SMSA-level estimates of public capital stocks in order to examine the productive contribution of public capital. I find that public capital has a...

We exploit the distributional information contained in high-frequency intraday data in constructing a simple conditional moment estimator for stochastic volatility diffusions. The estimator is based on the analytical solutions of the first two conditional moments for the latent integrated...

We examine the effects of the economy on the government budget as well as the effects of the budget on the economy. First, we provide measures of the effects of automatic stabilizers on budget outcomes at the federal and state and local levels. For the federal government, the deficit increases...