The U.S. credit card market is highly concentrated and highly profitable, two facts which have drawn scrutiny of its competitive practices. I study competition in this market by analyzing how lenders target and acquire new customers using direct-mail, their principal acquisition channel. I find...

This paper investigates the effects of the Medicaid expansion provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on households' financial health. Our findings indicate that, in addition to reducing the incidence of unpaid medical bills, the reform provided substantial indirect financial benefits to...

Title 3 of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (2009) limited the marketing and sale of credit cards to college students, nudging them away from these high-rate products. While it reduced card use, we find the nudge also raised student loan balances by 8.4%, 15%...

This paper establishes how the classical facts characterizing a failure of competition in credit card lending during the 1980s are largely reversed in the decades following. Between 1990 and 2008 lenders' mark-ups decreased by 35 percent, profits shrank by 32 percent relative the average in...

Debate over the U.S. federal estate tax has intensified recently as a result of the sunset provisions in the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA) of 2001 and changes in law passed in conjunction with the "fiscal cliff" at the end of 2012. Despite recent changes in the law,...

The economics literature generally considers products as points in some characteristics space. Starting with Hotelling, this served as a convenient assumption, yet with more products being .exible or self-customizable to some degree it makes sense to think that products have positive measure. I...

This paper analyzes the strategic use of bilateral supply contracts in sequential negotiations between one manufacturer and two differentiated retailers. The first main result is that, despite the feasibility of general supply contracts which are functions of own quantity (but cannot be...