Search Results
Working Paper
The Canary in the Coal Decline: Appalachian Household Finance and the Transition from Fossil Fuels
The energy transition away from fossil fuels presents significant transition risks for communities historically built around the fossil fuel industry. This paper uses the decline in the Appalachian coal industry between 2011 and 2018 to understand how individuals are harmed by a reduction in local fossil fuel extraction activity. We use individual-level credit data and exogenous variation in coal demand from the electricity sector to identify how the coal mining industry’s decline affected the finances of Appalachian households. We find that the decline in demand for coal caused broad-based ...
Discussion Paper
Improving Housing Payment Projections during the COVID-19 Pandemic
COVID-19 caused widespread job loss, raising concerns about whether people can still cover their rent or mortgage expenses. Policymakers and researchers are working to understand the effects of the pandemic on housing payments and predict future payment rates.
Working Paper
Targeted Relief: Geography and Timing of Emergency Rental Assistance
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress established the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program, which provided nearly $45 billion to prevent evictions and increase housing stability. We provide new evidence on the implementation of ERA by examining the fine-grained geographic distribution of ERA funds and the timing of ERA expenditures by state and local governments. Using administrative data on ERA transactions, we find that ERA sent more funds per renting household to census tracts with higher pre-pandemic eviction filing rates, higher poverty rates, higher shares of Black ...
Working Paper
Place-Based Labor Market Inequality
This paper presents an overview of how various labor market indicators differ across geography. While many indicators are often discussed in terms of national aggregates, such discussions obscure the large degree of variation that exists across localities. We primarily use counties as a geographic unit, and document both structural differences that persist over time as well as differences in the past two business cycles. The racial composition of communities plays a large role in explaining geographic differences in labor market indicators, in some cases even more so than income. We ...