Understanding how changes to local labor market conditions impact household spending and savings decisions is a central topic in labor economics. Frequently, housing is the largest item on a household's balance sheet, and therefore making monthly mortgage payments is often both the largest...

The shale oil and gas boom in the U.S. provides a unique opportunity to study economic growth in a "boom town" environment, to derive insights about economic expansions more generally, and to obtain clean identification of the causal effects of economic growth on specific margins of business...

Debate exists on the relative importance of employment status and house price declines in accounting for the large number of mortgage defaults during the Great Recession.To avoid the complexities posed by potential interactions among house prices, employment status, and income, we propose the...

Many borrowers make extra principal payments on their mortgages (curtailers). Some of these curtailers subsequently go through foreclosure and lose any benefits from their curtailments. Such curtailers reveal ex-ante non-strategic preferences towards default. We contrast the default sensitivity...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that landlords are negatively affected by tenant-friendly regulations, however limited empirical research exists to support this claim. Renter protection is multi-faceted and includes limits on security deposits and longer periods to evict tenants for non-payment. We...