This paper uses panel data through 2011 to examine evidence of shifts in household balance sheet behavior following the financial crisis and Great Recession. The paper considers evidence of balance sheet repair through debt repayment as well as changes in the composition of households' balance...

The effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of longstanding interest to economists. Conventional wisdom suggests that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity. This article considers so-called consumption wealth effects. There is an extensive existing...

The yield curve is often viewed as a leading indicator of recessions. While the yield curve's predictive power is not without controversy, its ability to anticipate economic downturns endures across specifications and time periods. This note examines the predictive power of the yield curve after...

This paper examines the effect of minimum wage changes on local aggregate inflation and consumption growth. The paper utilizes variation in state-level minimum wages across locations and finds that minimum wage increases have a relatively modest effect on both city-level inflation and spending...

Focusing on localized measures of bank health and economic activity, and renters as well as homeowners, this paper uses an innovative approach to identifying households likely in need of credit to investigate the effect on household spending of a deterioration in local-bank health. The analysis...

Using variation in minimum wages across cities and controlling for differences in business-cycle factors and long-run local economic trends, we find that following minimum wage increases, both prices and nominal spending rise modestly. These gains are larger for certain sub-categories of goods...

This paper examines the link between monetary policy and house-price appreciation by exploiting the fact that monetary policy is set at the national level, but has different effects on state-level activity in the United States. This differential impact of monetary policy provides an exogenous...

Residential investment accounts for an important component of U.S. gross domestic product, and traditionally plays a strong role in business cycle expansions. U.S. residential investment has improved slowly during the recovery from the Great Recession, despite a relatively strong national...

While the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has much to offer researchers studying household behavior, one limitation is that its summary measure of wealth is not as broad as those of other commonly used surveys, such as the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), because it does not include the...

This paper evaluates the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of the 2020 fiscal stimulus payments using high-frequency, transaction-level data for a sample of low-income cardholders, many of whom are unbanked. Consumers' MPC out of non-stimulus income and their MPC out of tax refunds are...