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Working Paper
Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas?allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes?as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as county-level data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine-learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity ...