Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

This paper explores the question of whether market participants could have or should have anticipated the large increase in foreclosures that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Most of these foreclosures stemmed from loans originated in 2005 and 2006, leading many to suspect that lenders originated a...

In this note we discuss the findings in Piskorski, Seru, and Vig (2010) as well as the authors' interpretation of their results. First, we find that small changes to the set of covariates used by Piskorski, Seru, and Vig significantly reduce the magnitude of the differences in foreclosure rates...

We estimate a model of foreclosure using a data set that includes every residential mortgage, purchase-and-sale, and foreclosure transaction in Massachusetts from 1989 to 2008. We address the identification issues related to the estimation of the effects of house prices on residential...

This paper takes a skeptical look at a leading argument about what is causing the foreclosure crisis and what should be done to stop it. We use an economic model to focus on two key decisions: the borrower's choice to default on a mortgage and the lender's subsequent choice whether to...

Securitization does not explain the reluctance among lenders to renegotiate home mortgages. We focus on seriously delinquent borrowers from 2005 through the third quarter of 2008 and show that servicers renegotiate similarly small fractions of securitized and portfolio loans. The results are...

This paper analyzes the impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on urban neighborhoods in Massachusetts. We explore the topic using a data set that matches race and income information from Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data with property-level, transaction data from Massachusetts Registry of Deeds...

In this paper we propose a method to estimate externality effects in cash transfer programmes, even in cases when the benefit is not randomly assigned. Externality is assessed through the decomposition of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) into participation (direct) effect and...

This paper investigates the impact of the pilot phase of Paraguay's conditional cash transfer programme, Tekoporã, on the demand for healthcare and education, and how much of this impact was due to the cash transfers and/or due to changes in behaviour/preferences, possibly as an effect of...

In 2008, the Swedish property tax was reformed and a cap on yearly tax liabilities was introduced. A large fraction of owner occupied houses was subject to a substantial decrease in the tax. When the reform was announced, most analysts projected - in line with tax capitalization theory - that...