This paper gives the first estimates for employee use of the Empowerment Zone (EZ) wage tax credit, a wage subsidy claimed by employers who operate in and hire residents of federally designated areas experiencing economic distress in the 1990s. I show that about 6.4 percent (and at least 3.5...

Public policy designed to encourage home ownership has operated primarily through the federal income tax system in the United States. With multiple incentives for home-ownership, the income tax system is the main tool by which the federal government encourages families to become home-owners and...

This paper provides evidence on the relationship between differential treatment of minority borrowers and their mortgage market outcomes. Using data from a field experiment that identifies differential treatment matched to real borrower transactions in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA)...

We simulate changes to metropolitan area home prices from reforming the Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID). Price simulations are based on an extended user cost model that incorporates two dimensions of behavioral change in home buyers: sensitivity of borrowing and the propensity to use tax...

We develop a tractable rational bubbles model with financial frictions, downward nominal wage rigidity, and the zero lower bound. The interaction of financial frictions and nominal rigidities leads to a "bubbly pecuniary externality," where competitive speculation in risky bubbly assets can...

We compare several common program evaluation techniques in evaluating the Empowerment Zone (EZ) program, a large US urban redevelopment program that consists primarily of tax credits and is run by the federal government. Studying the federal EZ program as a means to examine methodology is...