How far can shoe-leather go in explaining the welfare cost of inflation? Using a unique set of microeconomic data on households, we estimate the parameters of the demand for money derived from the generalized Baumol-Tobin model. Our data set contains information on average holdings of cash, on...

The Earned Income Tax Credit is unique among social programs in that benefits are not paid out evenly across the calendar year but are received in a lump-sum cash payment. We exploit this feature of the EITC to investigate how receiving this influx of cash affects food expenditure patterns of...

This study investigates the equilibrium demand for narrowly defined monetary aggregate during the Great Depression. We find evidence in support of a stable demand for real balance, but no evidence in support of stable demand functions for real currency and real monetary base. This is consistent...

This study investigates the stability of long-run log-linear demand functions for narrowly defined monetary aggregates (M1, Monetary Base) in the U.S. during the post World War II period. The hypotheses that the individual time series which appear in such equations (real M1, real Monetary Base,...

Bank-created money, shadow-bank money, and Treasury bonds all satisfy investors' demand for a liquid transaction medium and safe store of value. We measure the quantity of these three forms of liquidity and their corresponding liquidity premium over a sample from 1934 to 2016. We empirically...

This paper studies families' capacity to pay for college in the United States, focusing on changes over time and differences by race and socioeconomic status. I use data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) to document changes over time in the Expected Family Contribution...

We study how couples in the Medicare Part D program choose an insurance plan. Over 70 percent of enrollees choose the same plan as their spouse. Even among those with differing healthcare needs, well over half do so. Discrete-choice models suggest beneficiaries value being on the same plan as...