Debate over the U.S. federal estate tax has intensified recently as a result of the sunset provisions in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA) of 2001 and changes in law passed in conjunction with the "fiscal cliff" at the end of 2012. Despite recent changes in the law,...

A growing literature suggests that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and government sponsored enterprises' affordable housing goals, may have caused the subprime crisis. The conclusions drawn in this literature, for the most part, have been based on associations...

We use individual-level mortgage application data to empirically test for scale economies in neighborhood lending, and find evidence of significant economies associated with the scale of operation of individual lenders in a neighborhood. The inability to exploit these economies of scale is found...

This paper uses data from the January 2009 FDIC Unbanked/Underbanked Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine how household use of payday loans and pawn shops is related to limits on loan fees set by states. We use information in the CPS to measure the relationship between...