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Working Paper
Economic Benefits and Social Costs of Legalizing Recreational Marijuana
We analyze the effects of legalizing recreational marijuana on state economic and social outcomes (2000–20) using difference-in-differences estimation robust to staggered timing and heterogeneity of treatment. We find moderate economic gains accompanied by some social costs. Post-legalization, average state income grew by 3 percent, house prices by 6 percent, and population by 2 percent. However, substance use disorders, chronic homelessness, and arrests increased by 17, 35, and 13 percent, respectively. Although some of our estimates are noisy, our findings suggest that the economic ...
Working Paper
INFORMATION SPILLOVERS, GAINS FROM TRADE, AND INTERVENTIONS IN FROZEN MARKETS
We study government interventions in markets suffering from adverse selection. Importantly, asymmetric information prevents both the realization of gains from trade and the production of information that is valuable to other market participants. We find a fundamental tension in maximizing welfare: While some intervention is required to restore trading, too much intervention depletes trade of its informational content. We characterize the optimal policy that balances these two considerations and explore how it depends on features of the environment. Our model can be used to study a program ...
Working Paper
Do Small Businesses Still Prefer Community Banks?
We formulate and test hypotheses about the role of bank type ? small versus large, single-market versus multimarket, and local versus nonlocal banks ? in banking relationships. The conventional paradigm suggests that "community banks" ? small, single market, local institutions ? are better able to form strong relationships with informationally opaque small businesses, while "megabanks" ? large, multimarket, nonlocal institutions ? tend to serve more transparent firms. Using the 2003 Survey of Small Business Finance (SSBF), we conduct two sets of tests. First, we test for the type of bank ...
Journal Article
The Economic and Epidemiological Impact of COVID-19 and Government Policies: Part 2
Health and containment policies were effective at curbing the spread of COVID-19, but at a significant economic cost. State-level economic support policies were effective at mitigating this cost and helped further curb the spread of the virus.
Journal Article
Economic Activity during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Model with “Acquired Immunity”
We calibrate a macroeconomic model with epidemiological restrictions using Colombian data. The key feature of our model is that a portion of the population is immune and cannot transmit the virus, which improves substantially the fit of the model to the observed contagion and economic activity data. The model implies that during 2020, government restrictions and the endogenous changes in individual behavior saved around 15,000 lives and decreased consumption by about 4.7 percent. The results suggest that most of this effect was the result of government policies.
Journal Article
The FHA and the GSEs as countercyclical tools in the mortgage markets
The authors examine the connection between government mortgage programs and economic outcomes during and after the financial crisis. They find a strong correlation between counties that participated more heavily in Federal Housing Administration (FHA)/Veterans Affairs (VA) and government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage lending before the crisis and better economic outcomes during and after the crisis. Although the financial crisis was a substantial shock to all counties, those more reliant on FHA/VA or GSE lending experienced smaller increases in unemployment rates; smaller declines in ...
Journal Article
The Economic and Epidemiological Impact of COVID-19 and Government Policies: Part 1
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on economic activity but generated only mild changes in health containment policies.