In spite of the large expected costs of needing long-term care, only 10-12 percent of the elderly population has private insurance coverage. Medicaid, which provides means-tested public assistance and pays for almost half of long-term care costs, spends more than $100 billion annually on...

In this paper, we assess whether welfare reform affects earnings only through mean impacts that are constant within but vary across subgroups. This is important because researchers interested in treatment effect heterogeneity typically restrict their attention to estimating mean impacts that are...

Whether government transfer programs increase the human capital of low-income children is a question of first-order policy importance. Such policies might help poor children if their parents are credit constrained, and so under-invest in their human capital. But it is also possible that whatever...

Nearly 20% of young prison inmates spent part of their youth in foster care - the placement of abused or neglected children with substitute families. Little is known whether foster care placement reduces or increases the likelihood of criminal behavior. This paper uses the placement frequency of...

An important element in considering school finance policies is that households are not passive. Instead they respond to policies with a combination of modified residential choice and political choice of tax levels. The highly stylized decision models of most existing analyses, however, lead to...

This paper documents the role of angel funding for the growth, survival, and access to follow-on funding of high-growth start-up firms. We use a regression discontinuity approach to control for unobserved heterogeneity between firms that obtain funding and those that do not. This technique...

This paper develops a dynamic model of neighborhood choice along with a computationally light multi-step estimator. The proposed empirical framework captures observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity across households and locations in a flexible way. The model is estimated using a newly...

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

In this paper we examine the relationship between homeowners' bankruptcy decisions and their mortgage default decisions and the relationship between homeowners' bankruptcy decisions and lenders' decisions to foreclose. In theory, both relationships could be either substitutes or complements....