Wage garnishment allows private and public creditors to pull money directly out of a worker's paycheck to repay defaulted debt. Despite growing public concern surrounding the effects of strict debt collection mechanisms, a dearth of data has precluded empirical examination of the prevalence of...

Because corporate limited liability protects founder's personal assets, creditors often require founders of new, small and risky firms to contract around limited liability by pledging their personal assets as collateral for loans to their firms. This makes personal bankruptcy law (PBL) relevant...

Dun's Review began publishing monthly data on bankruptcies by branch of business during the 1890s. Those series evolved through many iterations. This essay reconstructs the series from 1895 to 1935 and discusses how it can be used for economic analysis

We study the joint evolution of prices and rents of residential property. After constructing rent and price indices for renter- and owner-occupied properties, we decompose the change in the price of occupant-owned property into (1) changes in rent, (2) changes in the relative prices of investor-...

This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased...

According to ECB (2023) and European Systemic Risk Board (2022), Swedish owner-occupied housing (OOH) was overvalued by about 55% in 2021q2, the largest overvaluation in the EU and EEA; according to European Commission (2023c), by about 30% in 2022. These assessments affect warnings and...

This paper estimates the incidence of state corporate taxes using new data and methods for estimating the effects on profits. We extend Suarez Serrato and Zidar (2016) by developing two new identification approaches that use the effects of business taxes on the labor demand of incumbent firms...

The vast majority of U.S. inventors work for firms that also have inventors and plants in other tech clusters. Using merged USPTO-U.S. Census Bureau plant-level data, we show that larger tech clusters not only make local inventors more productive but also raise the productivity of inventors and...

We quantify racial differences in the total rate of return on housing in a nationally representative sample of homeowners from 1974-2021. We develop a new method to estimate the rental value of each owner-occupied house, using a house's resale value to proxy for unobservable quality. Black and...

Disequilibrating macro shocks affect different firms' prospects differently, increasing idiosyncratic variation in forward-looking stock returns before affecting economic growth. Consistent with most such shocks from 1947 to 2020 enhancing productivity, increased idiosyncratic stock return...