We examine the impact of subsidized housing on homelessness using the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the largest place-based housing program in the United States. To generate quasi-experimental variation in housing placements, we exploit a discontinuous increase in the amount of tax...

We study the joint evolution of prices and rents of residential property. After constructing rent and price indices for renter- and owner-occupied properties, we decompose the change in the price of occupant-owned property into (1) changes in rent, (2) changes in the relative prices of investor-...

Leveraging novel data on consumer credit and debit card spending by Zip code, this study examines how the impact of government transfers on economic well-being varied by household type during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that pandemic transfers disproportionately benefited...

The history of foreign development assistance is one of movement away from addressing immediate needs to a focus on the underlying causes of poverty. A recent manifestation is the move towards “sustainability,” which stresses community mobilization, education, and cost-recovery. This stands...

This paper studies the elimination of traditional pensions and subsequent adoption of 401(k) plans by U.S. employers. Using thousands of firm-level natural experiments, it shows that unexpected losses in future compensation engendered by pension plan transitions induce premature retirement for...

We estimate the effect of 70 y Más, an age-conditioned transfer program for individuals age 70 and older in rural Mexico, on the labor force participation of beneficiaries and of younger individuals who live with them. Using data from the 2010 Mexican Census, we exploit the age and locality...

One consequence of demographic change is substantial shifts in the age distribution of the workingage population. As the baby boom generation ages, the usual historical pattern of a high ratio of younger workers relative to older workers has been replaced by a pattern of roughly equal...

The way that consumers make payments is changing rapidly and attracts important current policy interest. This paper develops and estimates a structural model of adoption and use of payment instruments by U.S. consumers. We use a cross-section of data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a...

We exploit scanner data to track payment choice for grocery purchases for a large panel of households over three years. We show that households focus most of their expenditures on one or at most two of these instruments in choosing between using cash, a check, or a card, and they very rarely...

Using data from a nationally representative survey on consumer payment behavior, we estimate Heckman two-stage regressions on the adoption and use of seven different payment instruments. We find that the characteristics of payments are important in determining consumer payment behavior, even...