Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

Every year many states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes and school supplies from the state sales tax. We use two data sets, the Diary portion of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and a unique data set of credit cards transactions, to investigate the...

The concept of diminishing marginal utility is a cornerstone of economic theory. The consumption of a good typically creates satiation that diminishes the marginal utility of consuming more. Temporal satiation induces consumers to increase their stimulation level by seeking variety and therefore...

Online shopping surged in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating the pre-pandemic shift toward increased online consumer activity. This trend fed into concerns over the success of top retailers at the expense of smaller ones. Further, it raised questions of whether consumers...

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer spending are of key interest to governments working to...

This paper estimates how online consumer spending responds to changes in air pollution. We address the endogeneity of air pollution in affecting household consumption by exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in air quality caused by China's Huai River heating policy. We use a comprehensive...

Sales tax holidays (STHs) are the temporary suspension of state (and some local) sales taxes on selected retail items for a brief period of time. The policy has gained popularity in recent years, beginning in one state in 1997and growing to twenty by 2008. Despite the increased frequency with...

While the literature on how intergovernmental grants affect the budget of receiving jurisdictions is numerous, the very few studies that explicitly deal with likely endogeneity problems focus on grants targeted towards specific sectors or to specific type of recipients. The results from these...