For many Americans the question of when to claim Social Security benefits is one of the most consequential financial decisions they will ever face. While acknowledging that individuals differ in terms of optimal timing for starting Social Security benefits, many economists argue that an average...

We run a field experiment and a survey experiment to study an active choice nudge. Our nudge is designed to reduce the anchoring of credit card payments to the minimum payment. In our field experiment, the nudge reduces enrollment in Autopaying the minimum from 36.9% to 9.6%. However, the nudge...

This paper introduces consumption segregation, a new margin of residential segregation, and examines its patterns, causes, and discusses its aggregate consequences. We use new longitudinal and highly granular data to measure consumption segregation in the United States and document that it is...

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the landmark 2018 Wayfair case greatly improved state governments' ability to enforce collection of sales taxes on a destination basis. This has reduced state tax competition with an essentially-untaxed internet, but has brought traditional cross-border...

We study whether savings nudges have the unintended consequence of additional borrowing in high-interest credit. We use data from a pre-registered experiment that encouraged 3.1 million bank customers to save via SMS messages and train a machine learning algorithm to predict individual-level...

The US trade war against China in 2018-2019 can either enhance or diminish the US soft power in China, depending on whether it is recognized as legitimate by Chinese citizens. We study how the viewership of US movies--an important element of the US soft power--is affected by the trade war,...

A subset of harm reduction strategies encourages individuals to switch from a harmful addictive good to a less harmful addictive good; examples include e-cigarettes (substitutes for combustible cigarettes) and methadone and buprenorphine (substitutes for opioids). Such harm reduction methods have...

Is there consumer demand to support Black-owned businesses? To explore, we investigate the impact of a new feature on a large online platform that made the race of a set of Black business owners salient to customers. We find that this feature substantially increased demand for Black-owned...

Consumer choices are increasingly mediated by algorithms, which use data on those past choices to infer consumer preferences and then curate future choice sets. Behavioral economics suggests one reason these algorithms so often fail: choices can systematically deviate from preferences. For...

Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men. Book authorship is now an exception. In 1970, women published a third as many books as men. By 2020, women produced the majority of books. Adding new products can have significant welfare...