Past research argues that changes in adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) payments may lead households to cut back on consumption or to default on their mortgages. In this paper, we argue that these outcomes are more likely if ARM borrowers are borrowing constrained, and find that ARM borrowers...

Using a new dataset, we document a systematic pattern in the demographic characteristics of car buyers over the model year: as vehicle prices fall over the model year, so do buyer incomes. This pattern is consistent with price-insensitive buyers purchasing early in the year, while others wait...

This paper presents evidence that consumers underreact to taxes that are not salient and characterizes the welfare consequences of tax policies when agents make such optimization errors. The empirical evidence is based on two complementary strategies. First, we conducted an experiment at a...

This paper argues that constraining people to choose consumption and labor under finite Shannon capacity produces results in line with U.S. business cycle data. My model has a simple partial equilibrium setting in which risk averse consumers keep high labor supply and low consumption profile at...

This paper relates firm location choice and consumer search. Firms that cluster together attract consumers by facilitating price comparison, but clustering increases the intensity of local competition. I construct a simple model which shows that firms may choose head-on competition by locating...

In his classic Papers relating to Political Economy (1897), Francis Edgeworth demonstrated that when duopolists have limited productive capacity, there may be no Nash equilibrium in prices. One feature of Edgeworth's model is that consumers are assumed to meet with the duopolists at the same...