This paper measures the impact of housing price changes on household consumption at the city level using the universe of credit and debit card transactions in China from 2011 to 2013. In sharp contrast to the literature on the U.S. housing market, our analysis shows a large and negative housing...

We use detailed information from U.S. consumers' credit card purchases to provide the first large scale description of the geography of consumption. We find that consumers' mobility is quite limited and document significant heterogeneity in the importance of gravity across sectors. We develop a...

At borders where rich and poor countries meet, services prices differ hugely. In principle, price differentials could be exploited to mutual benefit, offering improved job opportunities to the poor as well as better shopping opportunities to the rich. However, cross-border shopping is often...

We link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: County-level measures of mobility declined 8% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into...

Germany’s 1990 reunification necessitated highway connections between an underdeveloped region and a western country. The 2009/2013 German Autobahn highway A38 completion/additions alleviated congestion, enhanced connectivity, and increased pollution/noise. Using German residential real estate...

This paper introduces consumption segregation, a new margin of residential segregation, and examines its patterns, causes, and discusses its aggregate consequences. We use new longitudinal and highly granular data to measure consumption segregation in the United States and document that it is...

Economists, psychologists, and marketing researchers rely on measures of consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) in estimating demand for private and public goods and in designing optimal price schedules. Existing market research techniques for measuring WTP differ in whether they provide an...

Social scientists studying the disadvantages of poor urban neighborhoods have focused on the quality of publicly provided amenities. However, the quantity and quality of local private amenities, such as grocery stores and restaurants, can also have important quality of life implications for...

This study explores how information helps housing consumers make informed decisions and discusses potential market outcomes. We analyse the interaction between the disclosure of information on property conditions and the disparity between home sellers' willingness to accept (WTA) and home...

We propose that, in addition to the first price of a repeat pair, sellers also anchor to local fundamentals at the date of the first sale. We redefine an important diagnostic tool for housing cycles by replacing the ratio of house prices to fundamentals with a salient gap: change in market value...