We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (EPU-S), one that captures national and international...

COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home (WFH). We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied from home after the pandemic ends, compared with just 5...

We examine the effects of must-access prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) and recent regulations limiting the duration of initial opioid prescriptions on care received by patients with work-related injuries, focusing on opioid utilization and medical care related to pain management. We...

Recent policy debate on minimum wages has focused not only on raising the minimum wage, but on eliminating the tip credit for restaurant workers. We use data on past variation in tip credits - or minimum wages for restaurant workers - to provide evidence on the potential impacts of eliminating...

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet access quality, exploiting data from the new Survey of Working Arrangements...

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...

The U.S. economy's nonfinancial debt ratio has risen since 1980 to a level that is extraordinary in comparison with prior historical experience. Approximately one-half of this rise has consisted of increased indebtedness (relative to income) of borrowers in the economy's private sector,...

The rapidly growing net inflow of capital from abroad, mirroring the extraordinary deterioration of the U.S. export-import balance, has played a major role in equilibrating overall saving and investment in the United States in the face of unprecedentedly large and persistent federal goverriment...

The observed reluctance of most individuals in the United States to buy individual life annuities, and the concomitant approximately flat average age-wealth profile, stand in sharp contradiction to the standard life cycle model of consumption-saving behavior. The analysis in this paper lends...