In an influential paper, Mian, Rao and Sufi (2013) exploit geographic variation in housing supply elasticities to measure the effect of changes in the housing share of net worth on total household expenditures during the Great Recession. Their widely-cited estimates are based on proprietary...

We measure the aggregate effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment and the labor force. We exploit the variation induced by Congress' failure in December 2013 to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that...

Equilibrium labor market theory suggests that unemployment benefit extensions affect unemployment by impacting both job search decisions by the unemployed and job creation decisions by employers. The existing empirical literature focused on the former effect only. We develop a new methodology...

The US net foreign asset position has deteriorated sharply in the years following the Global Financial Crisis and is currently negative 65 percent of US GDP. This deterioration primarily reflects changes in the relative values of large gross international equity positions, as opposed to net new...

We develop an ECON-EPI network model to evaluate policies designed to improve health and economic outcomes during a pandemic. Relative to the standard epidemiological SIR set-up, we explicitly model social contacts among individuals and allow for heterogeneity in their number and stability. In...

We document that declining hours worked are the primary driver of widening inequality in the bottom half of the male labor earnings distribution in the United States over the past 52 years. This decline in hours is heavily concentrated in recessions: hours and earnings at the bottom fall sharply...

The paper studies a fiscal policy instrument that can reduce fiscal distortions without affecting revenues, in a politically viable way. The instrument is a private contract (tax buyout), offered by the government to each citizen, whereby the citizen can choose to pay a fixed price in exchange...

We conduct a systematic empirical study of cross-sectional inequality in the United States, integrating data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and the Survey of Consumer Finances. In order to understand how different...

In simple one-good international macro models, the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk means that country portfoliosshould be heavily biased toward foreign assets. The fact that theopposite pattern of diversification is observed empirically constitutes the international...

The early 1980s marked the onset of two striking features of the current world macro-economy: the fall in US business cycle volatility (the "great moderation") and the large and persistent US external imbalance. In this paper we argue that an external imbalance is a natural consequence of the...