AbstractHow unequal are the gains from trade? This paper develops a structural framework to quantify the consequences of international trade on welfare of consumers across the income distribution, allowing for nonhomothetic demand and endogenous qualit…
AbstractWe show how to use commuting flows to infer the spatial distribution of income within a city. A simple workplace choice model predicts a gravity equation for commuting flows whose destination fixed effects correspond to wages. We implement this…
AbstractWe link the county-level rollout of stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic to anonymized cell phone records and consumer spending data. We document three patterns. First, stay-at-home orders caused people to stay home: county-level me…
AbstractThis paper develops a New Keynesian model featuring financial intermediation, short- and long-term bonds, credit shocks, and scope for unconventional monetary policy. The log-linearized model reduces to four equations: Phillips and IS curves, a…
AbstractWe analyze sectoral labor reallocation and the reversal of urbanization in the United States during the Great Depression. The widespread movement to farms, which serves as a form of migratory insurance during the crisis, is largely toward farms…
AbstractThis paper studies individual and social motives in tax evasion. We build a simple dynamic model that incorporates these motives and their interaction. The social motives underpin the role of norms and are the source of the dynamics that we stu…
AbstractA large-scale microcredit expansion program—together with a credit bureau accessible to all lenders—can enable unbanked borrowers to build a credit history, facilitating their transition to commercial banks. Loan-level data from Rwanda show the…
AbstractWe study the finite sample behavior of Lasso-based inference methods such as post–double Lasso and debiased Lasso. We show that these methods can exhibit substantial omitted variable biases (OVBs) due to Lasso’s not selecting relevant controls….
AbstractRecent research offers mixed results concerning the relationship between inflation expectations and consumption, using qualitative measures of readiness to spend. We revisit this question using survey panel data of actual spending from the Unit…
AbstractWe test whether the provision of multiple labeled savings accounts affects savings and downstream outcomes in an experiment with 761 microentrepreneurs in urban Malawi. Treatment respondents received one or multiple savings accounts, in the for…