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Home insurance premiums influence mortgage delinquencies, relocations
The rise in homeowners insurance premiums since the pandemic is not just a pricing issue; it is a growing source of financial stress, inequality and geographic sorting.
Measures of inflation misalign with pricier home insurance
Overall, homeowners insurance is becoming less affordable, yet this deterioration in affordability is not well captured by either of the most widely used inflation measures—CPI or PCE—both designed to track price levels rather than affordability or household financial strain.
COVID-era eviction moratoriums improved financial well-being...while they lasted
This analysis leverages new eviction and credit data from Dallas County, Texas, to explore the impact of the moratoriums and to examine trends that surfaced once the moratoriums ended.
Rents, home values depressed in air pollution hotspots
Wildfire smoke pollution may significantly affect housing market activity in locations hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the fires.
Dirty air from wildfires casts a cloud over household finances
Using California's Camp Fire as a natural laboratory, this article examines the effects of both fire and smoke-related air pollution on household credit card spending and repayment.
Working Paper
Audit Partners and Loan Loss Provisioning: Evidence from U.S. Bank Holding Companies
This paper uses confidential data on audit engagement partner names from regulatory filings of bank holding companies (BHC) to investigate whether partners display individual style that affects the financial reporting of the BHCs. We focus on loan loss provisioning. We construct an audit partner-BHC matched panel data set that enables us to track different partners across different BHCs over time. We employ two empirical approaches to investigate partner style. The first approach tests whether partner fixed effects are statistically significant in loan loss provisioning models. The second ...
Working Paper
Gender Gaps in the Federal Reserve System
To better understand the stalled progress of women in economics, we construct new data on women’s representation and research output in one of the largest policy institutions—the Federal Reserve System. We document a slight increase in women’s representation over the past 20 years, in line with academic trends. We also document a significant gender gap in research output, especially for years in which economists have greater domestic responsibilities, but nearly absent gender gaps in policy output and career progression. This work complements existing research on women in academia, ...
Working Paper
Air Pollution and Rent Prices: Evidence from Wildfire Smoke Plumes
We leverage quasi-experimental wildfire smoke shocks to analyze the causal effect of air pollution (PM2.5) on rent prices, using satellite-based smoke plumes data and ambient air pollution data. Our results indicate that the rent of homes that are not directly affected by wildfires but exposed to wildfire plumes declines by about -2.4% per one standard deviation increase in PM2.5. The response of home prices is more than threefold highlighting a gap in the tolerance of poor air quality, which we find is driven by age-related differences between tenants and homeowners. We further show evidence ...
Working Paper
Up in Smoke: The Impact of Wildfire Pollution on Healthcare Municipal Finance
Climate risk pricing is not necessarily tied to physical damages from local climate events. Large-scale wildfires generate hazardous smoke plumes that impose costs on distant hospitals by increasing relative demand from underinsured patients. We show that wildfire smoke increases credit risk in the healthcare municipal bond market, especially in areas with high underinsurance. A natural experiment using the staggered expansion of Medicaid provides additional evidence consistent with the underinsurance channel. Hospital-level tests indicate that wildfire smoke reduces profitability and ...
Working Paper
Up in Smoke: The Impact of Wildfire Pollution on Healthcare Municipal Finance
Wildfire smoke pollution is associated with significantly higher healthcare municipal borrowing costs, amounting to $250 million in realized interest costs for high-smoke counties in 2010–2019, and an estimated $570 million over the following 10 years. These costs are disproportionately higher in high-poverty or high-minority areas where there is more smoke-related uncompensated care. Out-of-state smoke is also associated with higher borrowing costs, suggesting poor wildfire management imposes externalities on nearby states. Our hospital-level analysis shows increases in asthma cases and ...