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Discussion Paper
Do People Care More About Inflation or Wage Growth?
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer sentiment was low despite historically low unemployment and high wage growth. This same period coincided with inflation rates that were the highest in a generation.
Working Paper
The effect of ending the pandemic-related mandate of continuous Medicaid coverage on health insurance coverage
The Medicaid continuous enrollment provision, which ensured uninterrupted coverage for beneficiaries during the COVID-19 pandemic, was ended in March 2023. This unwinding process has led to large-scale Medicaid disenrollments, as states resumed their standard renewal process to evaluate enrolled individuals' eligibility status. Our analysis investigates whether resumption of states' renewal process has led to an increase in the risk of becoming uninsured for adults aged under 65 and affected their household economic well-being. Using state-month variation in the timing of the first round of ...
Report
Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023
Results from the 2023 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) indicate that people’s overall financial well-being was nearly unchanged from the previous year but below the high reached in 2021. Despite the moderating pace of inflation, many adults continued to indicate that higher prices were a challenge in managing their finances. The survey, which was fielded in October 2023, showed similar patterns for other measures of financial resiliency as well. Both the share of adults who spent less than their income in the month before the survey and the share who would pay for an ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Liquidity Constraints on Labor Supply: Evidence from Interest Rate Ceilings
We exploit the spatiotemporal variation in US states’ interest rate ceilings on small-dollar loans to identify the effect of liquidity constraints on labor supply. Exogenously-capped interest rates lead to consumers being shut out of the market for cash loans. In response, labor supply increases by approximately 0.4 hours per week. We also find that the propensity to take personal leaves decreases. Labor supply, therefore, is used to overcome financial constraints, but is not the only method: the effect on earnings is less than many small-dollar loans, suggesting that borrowers employ ...