This paper examines the effect of minimum wage changes on local aggregate inflation and consumption growth. The paper utilizes variation in state-level minimum wages across locations and finds that minimum wage increases have a relatively modest effect on both city-level inflation and spending...

Focusing on localized measures of bank health and economic activity, and renters as well as homeowners, this paper uses an innovative approach to identifying households likely in need of credit to investigate the effect on household spending of a deterioration in local-bank health. The analysis...

While the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has much to offer researchers studying household behavior, one limitation is that its summary measure of wealth is not as broad as those of other commonly used surveys, such as the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), because it does not include the...

There are more young adults today with either no credit history or insufficient credit history to be scored by one of the major credit bureaus than there were before the Great Recession−a reality that is likely an unintended outcome of the CARD Act of 2009. In regressions that include a rich set...

We study the mortgage cash flow channel of monetary policy transmission under fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) versus adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) regimes by comparing the United States with primarily long-term FRMs and Spain with primarily ARMs that automatically reset annually. We find a robust...

This paper evaluates the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of the 2020 fiscal stimulus payments using high-frequency, transaction-level data for a sample of low-income cardholders, many of whom are unbanked. Consumers' MPC out of non-stimulus income and their MPC out of tax refunds are...

This paper develops a comprehensive measure of household economic well-being. The "sustainable consumption" concept accounts for income, assets, debt, transfer payments, and asset returns to estimate a consumption path that balances resources with expenditure over a household's lifetime....

The effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of longstanding interest to economists. Analysts believe that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity. This paper considers so-called wealth effects - the impact of changes in wealth on household consumption...

This paper uses panel data through 2011 to examine evidence of shifts in household balance sheet behavior following the financial crisis and Great Recession. The paper considers evidence of balance sheet repair through debt repayment as well as changes in the composition of households' balance...

The United States has a long history of promoting homeownership through the mortgage interest tax deduction, and home equity constitutes an important source of borrowing collateral. There is a sizable body of work studying how fluctuating house prices impact consumer behavior. Since college...