In this paper we analyze the synchronization between the business cycles of US and Mexican regions. Regional economic activity in Mexico is measured using regional coincident indexes recently developed at Banco de México, while US aggregate economic activity is measured with the national...

A fiscal shock due to a shift in taxes or in government spending will, at some point in time, constrain the future path of taxes and spending, since the government's intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of the...

Policymakers have an interest in identifying the differences in behavior patterns - namely, habitual caloric intake and physical activity levels - that contribute to demographic variation in body mass index (BMI) and obesity risk. While disparities in mean BMI and obesity rates between whites...

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that...

We conduct field experiments in a large real-world social network to examine why decision-makers treat their friends more generously than strangers. Subjects are asked to divide a surplus between themselves and named partners at varying social distances, but only one of these decisions is...

The rising stockpile of cash as a share of total assets at U.S. firms has intrigued economists since at least the paper of Bates, Kahle, and Stulz (2006), yet there has been relatively little work on where this cash has come from and how it is related to investment performance. We exploit...

This paper examines whether rising house prices immediately prior to children entering their college years impacts their intergenerational earnings mobility and/or educational outcomes. Higher house prices provide homeowners, especially liquidity constrained ones, with additional funding to...

We combine information on social networks with medical records and survey data in order to examine how friends affect one's decision to get vaccinated against the flu. The random assignment of undergraduates to residential halls at a large private university allows us to estimate how peer...

The measurement of bank output, a difficult and contentious issue, has become even more important in the aftermath of the devastating financial crisis of recent years. In this paper, we argue that models of banks as processors of information and transactions imply a quantity measure of bank...

Approximately half of credit card holders in the United States regularly carry unpaid credit card debt. These so-called revolvers exhibit payment behavior that differs from that of those who repay their entire credit card balance every month. Previous literature has focused on the adoption of...