The Surveys of Consumers has been conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan since 1946. Each month, 500 individuals are randomly selected from the contiguous United States (48 states plus the District of Columbia) to participate in the Surveys of Consumers. The...

This essay explores various components of a measure of pretax U.S. family income after adjusting for the size of the family in the U.S. in 1975 and 2000. Using data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, an important stylized fact is revealed: The rising inequality of property incomes,...

This paper examines the link between monetary policy and house-price appreciation by exploiting the fact that monetary policy is set at the national level, but has different effects on state-level activity in the United States. This differential impact of monetary policy provides an exogenous...

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the use of biological measures are now standard in economics. This study uses late 19th and early 20th century BMI, statures, and weight to assess how net nutrition accumulated to women and men during US economic development....

An extensive literature on labor-market outcomes by sexual orientation finds lower wages for gay men compared to heterosexual men and higher wages for lesbians compared to heterosexual women. Recent work looking over multiple time periods provides suggestive evidence, however, that the wage...

How households shift spending across firms in response to income fluctuations is an important source of risk to individual firms. Using transaction-level data, we study how households interact with the universe of retailers following changes in income. We find that increases in income, both...

This paper develops a theoretical framework to explain the limited effect of business development programs (BDPs) on entrepreneurs' profits. We argue that a mismatch between a BDP's narrow focus on business-promoting strategies and the wider context in which microentrepreneurs operate can limit...

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the use of biological measures are now standard in economics. This study uses late 19th and early 20th century BMI, statures, and weight to assess how net nutrition accumulated to women and men during US economic development....

One's personal identity can play an important role in decision-making. We propose that a key identity that shapes behavior among poor populations is conceptualizing oneself as financially insecure, which we term “poverty identity.” Two experiments suggest that this identity can influence...