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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 17.
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Journal Article
Workers' Shrinking Share of the Pie
Features: {{p}} Economists have advanced a wide variety of explanations for why workers' share of overall income has been going down
Discussion Paper
Does U.S. Health Inequality Reflect Income Inequality—or Something Else?
Health is an integral part of well-being. The United Nations Human Development Index uses life expectancy (together with GDP per capita and literacy) as one of three key indicators of human welfare across the world. In this post, I discuss the state of life expectancy inequality in the United States and examine some of the underlying factors in its evolution over the past several decades.
Discussion Paper
Distribution of COVID-19 Incidence by Geography, Race, and Income
In this post, we study whether (and how) the spread of COVID-19 across the United States has varied by geography, race, income, and population density. Have urban areas been more affected by COVID-19 than rural areas? Has population density mattered in the spread? Has the coronavirus's impact varied by race and income? Our analysis uncovers stark demographic and geographic differences in the effects of the pandemic thus far.
Report
Credit, Income and Inequality
Analyzing unique data on loan applications by individuals who are majority owners of small firms, we detail how a bank’s credit decisions affect their future income. We use the bank’s cutoff rule, which is based on the applicants’ credit scores, as the discontinuous locus providing exogenous variation in the decision to grant loans. We show that application acceptance increases recipients’ income five years later by more than 10 percent compared to denied applicants. This effect is mostly driven by the use of borrowed funds to undertake investments, and is stronger when individuals ...
Working Paper
Health Insurance as an Income Stabilizer
We evaluate the effect of health insurance on the incidence of negative income shocks using the tax data and survey responses of nearly 14,000 low income households. Us-ing a regression discontinuity (RD) design and variation in the cost of nongroup pri-vate health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, we find that eligibility for sub-sidized Marketplace insurance is associated with a 16% and 9% decline in the rates of unexpected job loss and income loss, respectively. Effects are concentrated among households with past health costs and exist only for “unexpected” forms of earnings ...
Journal Article
Determinants of Housing Values and Variations in Home Prices Across Neighborhoods in Cook County
From 2007 to 2009, the U.S. underwent one of the worst recessions in its history, a recession triggered by an unprecedented, international financial crisis that resulted from institutional portfolio concentration in securities backed by home mortgages, and the collapse of that securities market. The period saw a wave of defaults and foreclosures that spared almost no communities in metropolitan areas throughout the country (Bajaj and Story, 2008). Loan defaults and foreclosures, which had tended to be concentrated in lower-income and minority neighborhoods, spread to new and diverse ...
Journal Article
Market Failure and Community Economic Development in the US
This article explores the "political economy of community development" in the United States, with historical context on market failures. The authors, for the purposes of this article, also explore lending patterns in the Seventh Federal Reserve District.
Journal Article
Maintaining Housing Affordability: The Role of University Partnerships in Iowa City and Other Communities
This article comprises two main elements; the first is a review of this process and those meetings. It begins with an overview of how UI policies have impacted affordable housing markets in Johnson County, the county home of Iowa City. The second section describes university partnerships that involve institutional engagement to address local housing issues and other local needs, shared by three university professionals from Drexel University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conclusion is a short description of next steps.
Journal Article
Education and the Evolution of Earnings Across Population Groups Since 2000
By nearly all macroeconomic measures, the US economy is in good shape: unemployment is low, jobs growth is steady, inflation is stable, and GDP has expanded uninterrupted for 10 years?the longest expansion in US history. The good news from the aggregate data means that most people are in the best economic position they have been in for some time. But by definition, aggregate data cannot tell us whether an overall good economy is benefitting some population groups more than others. This article disaggregates the good news in the macrodata by tracking the fortunes of a variety of population ...
Working Paper
Social Interventions, Health and Wellbeing: The Long-Term and Intergenerational Effects of a School Construction Program
We analyze the long-run and intergenerational effects of a large-scale school building project (INPRES) that took place in Indonesia between 1974 and 1979. Specifically, we link the geographic rollout of INPRES to longitudinal data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey covering two generations. We find that individuals exposed to the program have better health later in life along multiple measures. We also find that the children of those exposed also experience improved health and educational outcomes and that these effects are generally stronger for maternal exposure than paternal exposure. ...