There has been little rigorous evaluation of immigration barriers intended to improve domestic terms of employment by shrinking the workforce. We study one such barrier, a policy change that excluded almost half a million Mexican bracero seasonal agricultural workers from the United States....

Expenditure visibility--the extent to which a household's spending on a consumption category is noticeable to others--is measured in three new surveys, with ~3,000 telephone and online respondents. Visibility shows little change across time (ten years) and survey methods. Four different notions,...

This paper analyzes how the decision of when to buy a durable good affects both non-durable consumption and business cycle dynamics. At the individual level, we show that the timing of durable goods purchases plays an important role in smoothing consumption over time. In the benchmark case, the...