Search Results
Working Paper
The ins and arounds in the U.S. housing market
In the United States, 15 percent of households change residence in a given year. This result is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on gross flows within and between the two segments of the housing market ? renter-occupied properties and owner-occupied properties. The gross flows between these two segments are four times larger than the net flows. From a secular perspective, housing turnover exhibits a hump-shaped pattern between 1970 and 2000, which this paper attributes to changes in the age composition of the U.S. population. At higher frequencies, housing turnover is ...
Working Paper
Quantifying the role of federal and state taxes in mitigating wage inequality
Wage inequality has risen dramatically in the United States since at least 1980. This paper quantifies the role that the tax policies of the federal and state governments have played in mitigating wage inequality. The analysis, which isolates the contribution of federal taxes and state taxes separately, employs two approaches. First, cross-sectional estimates compare before-tax and after-tax inequality across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Second, inequality estimates across time are calculated to assess the evolution of the effects of tax policies. The results from the first ...
Report
Population Aging and the US Labor Force Participation Rate
The labor force participation rate dropped sharply at the beginning of the pandemic, and as of November 2021 it had recovered only about half of its lost ground. The failure of the participation rate to get closer to its level immediately before the pandemic has puzzled many analysts. In this note, we show that the current participation rate is much less puzzling if one compares it with participation in November 2017 (the last time the unemployment rate was at its current level of 4.2 percent), rather than February 2020 (immediately before the pandemic). Since November 2017, population aging ...
Report
How the Student Loan Payment Pause Affected Borrowers’ Credit Access and Credit Use
This brief examines how the pandemic-related, 43-month moratorium on federal student loan payments and interest accruals affected borrowers’ credit card limits and balances. The pause freed up an average of $280 a month for each of the 17 million student loan holders in active repayment, and it included a provision that erased previous defaults on student loans.
Discussion Paper
Impending U.S. spending bust?: the role of housing wealth as borrowing collateral
Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper considers the mechanism by which changing house values impact U.S. household spending. The results suggest that house values affect consumption by serving as collateral for households to borrow against to smooth their spending. The results show that the consumption of households who need to borrow against their home equity increases by roughly 11 cents per $1.00 increase in their housing wealth. Changing house values, however, have little effect on the expenditures of households who do not need to borrow to finance their ...
Working Paper
The effects of changes in local-bank health on household consumption
This study investigates the relationship between credit availability and household consumption using a novel approach to separate credit demand and supply. We find that a deterioration in local bank health reduces household consumption, with the strongest effects occurring for households that are more likely to need credit—especially those experiencing a negative income shock and having limited liquid assets. The main contributions of the study are the use of an arguably exogenous measure of local bank health and multifaceted indicators of constrained households. Our findings contribute to ...
Working Paper
Household formation over time: evidence from two cohorts of young adults
This paper analyzes household formation in the United States using data from two cohorts of the national Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY)?the 1979 cohort and the 1997 cohort. The analysis focuses on how various demographic and economic factors impact household formation both within cohorts and over time across cohorts. The results show that there are substantial differences over time in the share of young adults living with their parents. Differences in housing costs and business-cycle conditions can explain up to 70 percent of the difference in household-formation rates across cohorts. ...
Working Paper
Imputing household spending in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics: a comparison of approaches
One of the drawbacks of using household surveys to investigate macroeconomic issues has been a lack of a dataset that contains both adequate household expenditure data and comprehensive household wealth and income data. This paper compares alternative methods of imputing household expenditures in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID)?that of Blundell et al. (2006) and Cooper ( 2009). It also analyzes the additional expenditure questions included in the PSID starting in 1999 and expanded in 2005. The paper finds that the Blundell et al. (2006) method works well for imputing households' ...
Briefing
Asymmetric responses to tax-induced changes in personal income: the 2013 payroll tax hike versus anticipated 2012 tax refunds
As part of the Boston Earned Income Tax Credit Coalition's free tax preparation service offered at the Boston Roxbury Resource Center between January and April 2013, 945 low-to-moderate income individuals were asked about payroll tax changes, financial planning, and their personal characteristics. Using these survey responses, the authors calculated how these individuals planned to respond to the payroll tax hike and their tax refund. The results show that their marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of the tax refund is 30 percentage points lower than their spending reaction to the tax ...
Working Paper
Consumption, credit, and the missing young
There are more young adults today with either no credit history or insufficient credit history to be scored by one of the major credit bureaus than there were before the Great Recession ? a reality that is likely an unintended outcome of the CARD Act of 2009. In regressions that include a rich set of controls, this paper shows that measures of young adults missing from credit bureau data act as a drag on state-level consumption growth. This finding seems to be driven by young individuals from more disadvantaged backgrounds having less access to credit since the act went into effect.