Like today, one hundred years ago air pollution was a matter of grave concern in the world's most polluted cities. In the wake of its famous 1908-9 social survey, the City of Pittsburgh commissioned an "Economic Survey of Pittsburgh" from John T. Holdsworth, a prominent institutional economist...

Contrary to historical episodes, the 2022-2023 tightening of US monetary policy has not yet triggered financial crisis in emerging markets. Why is this time different? To answer this question, we analyze the current situation through the lens of historical evidence. In emerging markets, the...

We study the international transmission of U.S. monetary policy (FED hikes) and a strong U.S. dollar. Both of these variables are endogenous and thus we follow the recent developments in the literature to measure the exogenous components of each from the perspective of the rest of the world...

A marked feature of health insurance plan choice is inconsistent choices through the overweighting of premiums relative to out-of-pocket spending. We show that this source of inconsistency disappears when both types of spending come from the same source of designated funds. We focus on the...

Digital technologies and fintech firms have rapidly reshaped the consumer financial landscape in recent years, and have the potential to help consumers make better decisions and improve their financial health. Existing technologies such as autopay are also experiencing increased takeup, a trend...

We use the German bombing of London during the Second World War as an exogenous source of variation to provide evidence on neighborhood effects. We construct a newly-digitized dataset at the level of individual buildings on wartime destruction, property values, and socioeconomic composition in...

Religious worship is integral to the lives of millions of Americans. In this paper, I provide a descriptive analysis of religious worship attendance using geodata from smartphones for over 2 million Americans in 2019. I establish several key findings. First, 73% of people step into a religious...

Fiscal policy in the U.S. and other countries renders intertemporal budgets non-differentiable, nonconvex, and discontinuous. Consequently, assessing work and saving responses to policy requires global optimization. This paper develops the Global Life-Cycle Optimizer (GLO), a stochastic...

Physicians commonly receive marketing-related transfers from drug firms. We examine the impact of these relationships on the prescribing of physician-administered cancer drugs in Medicare. We find that prescribing of the associated drug increases 4\% in the twelve months after a payment is...

Across many studies subjective well-being follows a U-shape in age, declining until people reach middle-age, only to rebound subsequently. Ill-being follows a mirror-imaged hump-shape. But this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in illbeing by age. The reason for the...