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Journal Article
What's happening at the state and local level
Journal Article
Changing Credit Profile of Consumers: Aging Versus the Business Cycle
The average consumer credit score reached a record high recently. While some commentators attributed this development to the cyclical rebound from the Great Recession, I find that the changing age distribution of credit applicants also played a significant role. Changes in demographics alone can explain 43 percent of the increase in the average score from 1999:Q1 to 2017:Q2.
Journal Article
Financial literacy education: a potential tool for reducing predatory lending?
A review of studies on the effectiveness of financial literacy training and whether such training results in responsible financial decision making by consumers.
Working Paper
Regulating two-sided markets: an empirical investigation
We study the effect of government encouraged or mandated interchange fee ceilings on consumer and merchant adoption and usage of payment cards in an economy where card acceptance is far from complete. We believe that we are the first to use bank- level data to study the impact of interchange fee regulation. We find that consumer and merchant welfare improved because of increased consumer and merchant adoption leading to greater usage of payment cards. We also find that bank revenues increased when interchange fees were reduced although these results are critically dependent on merchant ...
Working Paper
Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectations: Theory and Evidence
Based on indirect utility theory, we introduce a novel methodology of measuring inflation expectations indirectly. This methodology starts at the individual level, asking consumers about the change in income required to buy the same amounts of goods and services one year ahead. Analytically, our methodology possesses smaller ex-post aggregate inflation forecast errors relative to forecasts based on conventional survey questions. We ask this question in a large-scale, high-frequency survey of consumers in the US and 14 countries, and we show that indirect consumer inflation expectations ...
Working Paper
Consumer search, price dispersion, and international relative price volatility
This paper develops a model of consumer search consistent with the evidence of substantial price dispersion within countries. This model is used to study international relative price fluctuations. Consumer search frictions permit firms to price discriminate across markets based on the local wage of consumers. With price dispersion, the market price of a good does not measure its resource cost. This breaks the tight link between relative quantities and relative prices implied by most models. We show that volatile and persistent fluctuations in relative wages lead to volatile and persistent ...
Journal Article
Postwar use of consumer funds
Conference Paper
Reasons for optimism: the current state of the American economy
Journal Article
Consumer Spending Declines, Shifts in Response to the Pandemic
Consumer spending plunged last spring as the pandemic swept through the United States. Although spending rebounded sharply in the second half of 2020, it remained below year-ago levels due to persistently high unemployment, business restrictions, and continued health risks in social settings. In addition to the drop in overall spending, the pandemic has led to dramatic shifts in the mix of goods and services that consumers purchase.
Journal Article
Opinion : When disclosure is not enough