Projection bias is the tendency to overpredict the degree to which one's future tastes will resemble one's current tastes. We test for evidence of projection bias in two of the largest and most important consumer markets - the car and housing markets. Using data for more than forty million...

Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a...

Using a unique, national data set that indicates where students choose to send their SAT scores, the authors find that college sports success has a large impact on student application decisions. For example, a school that has a stellar year in basketball or football on average receives up to 10%...

Does a dramatic drop in crime lead to an increase in property values? To date, the literature on how crime influences property values has focused solely within a single metropolitan area and has been limited primarily to cross-sectional analysis. In this study we exploit the dramatic, nationwide...

Empirical studies have produced mixed results on the relationship between a school’s sports success and the quantity and quality of students that apply to the school. This study uses two unique data sets to shed additional light on the indirect benefits that sports success provides to NCAA...

When buying durable goods, consumers must forecast how much utility they will derive from future consumption, including consumption in different states of the world. This can be complicated for consumers because making intertemporal evaluations may expose them to a variety of psychological...

An integrated tax and transfer system together with factor mobility can help mitigate local shocks within monetary and fiscal unions. In this paper we explore the role of a new mechanism that may also be central to determining the welfare effects of regional shocks. The degree to which...

This paper investigates the impact of lower mortgage rates on household balance sheets and other economic outcomes during the housing crisis. We use proprietary loan-level panel data matched to consumer credit records using borrowers' Social Security numbers, which allows for accurate...

A large body of research has explored the importance of auction design and information structure for auction outcomes. Much less work has considered the importance of the auction process. For example, in many auctions, auctioneers are present and can impact the process of the auction by varying...

Models of reference-dependent preferences propose that individuals evaluate outcomes as gains or losses relative to a neutral reference point. We test for reference dependence in a large dataset of marathon finishing times (n = 9,524,071). Models of reference-dependent preferences such as...