Search Results
Discussion Paper
Trends in Debt Concentration in the United States By Income
Household debt in the United States expanded before the Great Recession, contracted afterward, and has been recovering since 2013. But how has the distribution of debt across different income groups evolved over time? Who has been driving the recovery of household debt over the past two years? To date, there has been little work on how borrowing patterns for high- and low-income individuals have changed over time, although one notable exception is Amromin and McGranahan. Here, using the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), a quarterly panel data set based on Equifax credit reports, we ...
Discussion Paper
The Capitol Since the Nineteenth Century: Political Polarization and Income Inequality in the United States
Even the most casual observer of American politics knows that today?s Republican and Democratic parties seem to disagree with one another on just about every issue under the sun. Some assume that this divide is merely an inevitable feature of a two-party system, while others reminisce about a golden era of bipartisan cooperation and hold out hope that a spirit of compromise might one day return to Washington. In this post, we present evidence that political polarization?or the trend toward more ideologically distinct and internally homogeneous parties?is not a recent development in the United ...
Report
Health spending slowed down in spite of the crisis
We exploit plausibly exogenous regulatory changes in the mortgage lending market to estimate causal effects of the financial boom and bust on personal income in the health sector. We find that counties that were exogenously more exposed to the crisis because of the regulatory reforms experienced a greater rise in the size of the health sector over the course of the boom and the bust relative to control counties, with the differential persisting through the recovery. We provide suggestive evidence that increased mortality during the bust and greater capital investment during the boom ...