Search Results
Working Paper
Your Friends, Your Credit: Social Capital Measures Derived from Social Media and the Credit Market
Chetty et al. (2022a) introduced an array of social capital measures derived from Facebook friendships and found that one of these indicators, economic connectedness (EC), predicted upward income mobility well. Bricker and Li (2017) proposed the average credit score of a community's residents as an indicator of local social trust. We show in this paper that the average credit scores are robustly correlated with EC, negatively correlated with the friending-bias measure introduced in Chetty et al. (2022b), and predict economic mobility to a comparable extent after controlling for EC. The ...
Working Paper
Who is Minding the Store? Order Routing and Competition in Retail Trade Execution
Using 150,000 actual trades, we study the U.S. equity retail broker-wholesaler market, focusing on brokers’ order routing and competition among wholesalers. We document substantial and persistent dispersion in execution costs across wholesalers within brokers. Despite this, many brokers hardly change their routing and even consistently send more orders to the more expensive wholesalers, although there is considerable variation among brokers. We also document a case where, after a new wholesaler enters, existing wholesalers significantly reduce their execution costs. Overall, our findings ...
Report
Consumer Credit Reporting Data
Since the 2000s, economists across fields have increasingly used consumer credit reporting data for research. We introduce readers to the economics of and the institutional details of these data. Using examples from the literature, we provide practical guidance on how to use these data to construct economic measures of borrowing, consumption, credit access, financial distress, and geographic mobility. We explain what credit scores measure, and why. We highlight how researchers can access credit reporting data via existing datasets or by creating new datasets, including by linking credit ...
Working Paper
CMBS Market Evolution and Emerging Risks
We study the evolution of the private-label CMBS market from one dominated by broadly diversified long-term, fixed-rate conduit securitizations to one dominated in 2021–22 by undiversified short-term, floating-rate Single-Asset, Single-Borrower (SASB) securitizations. Twenty-five years of stable bond returns and exceptionally low losses help explain the growth and standardization of the SASB market following the Global Financial Crisis. Historically low interest rates and pandemic-era dislocations help explain the recent dominance of short-term, floating-rate SASBs. Factors contributing to ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Labels on Real Asset Valuations
Expectations and sentiment of economic agents about financial prospects are both the drivers and the leading indicators of economic phenomena. This paper shows that neighborhood labels, frequently used in realtors’ property descriptions, have a causal impact on the demand for housing. Results indicate that appraised values, house prices and rents increased in minority neighborhoods upon removal of neighborhood labels. The underlying mechanism likely works through forming expectations about future growth in housing markets, as documented by the decrease in the rent-to-price ratio and lack of ...
Journal Article
How Much Would China’s GDP Respond to a Slowdown in Housing Activity?
We analyze China's interindustry connections and show that China?s housing activity has become increasingly important to its GDP growth. Our results suggest that a 10 percent decline in final demand for real estate and housing-related construction would lead to a decline in total output of 2.2 percent, an effect more than two times larger than it would have been 10 years ago.
Working Paper
The Smart Money is in Cash? Financial Literacy and Liquid Savings Among U.S. Families
Most financial advisors recommend storing three to six months of expenses in liquid assets in case of an emergency. Yet we estimate that more than half of U.S. families do not have at least three months of their non-discretionary expenses in liquid savings. We find that financial literacy is strongly predictive of having three months of liquid savings, controlling for income, income variability, and even parental resources. We also find that financial literacy predicts liquid savings across the income distribution. These results indicate that accumulation of an emergency fund is not ...
Discussion Paper
Climate Change and Consumer Finance: A Very Brief Literature Review
Extant research shows that climate change can impose significant costs on consumers’ wealth and finances. Both sea-level rise and flooding from hurricane events led to high price declines and thus wealth loss for homes in coastal areas or in disaster-struck areas, with effects lingering for a number of years in some cases. In terms of consumer finance, while the average consumer is not always significantly negatively affected by a disaster, the vulnerable groups (those with low credit scores and who are low income) can be severely affected, experiencing higher rates of delinquencies and ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Family Economic Well-being: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
The COVID-19 pandemic caused severe disruptions to the U.S. labor market and economic activity. We establish connections between family experiences of the pandemic, their income under normal conditions, and their later economic well-being using the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. By their interview, one-third of families experienced net employment declines, one-third had teleworked, and one-fifth had significant COVID-19-related health events. These experiences strongly reflected families’ positions in the income distribution, with lower-income families bearing the brunt. They also ...