Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:D10 

Working Paper
Income in the Off-Season: Household Adaptation to Yearly Work Interruptions

Joblessness is highly seasonal. To analyze how households adapt to seasonal joblessness, we introduce a measure of seasonal work interruptions premised on the idea that a seasonal worker will tend to exit employment around the same time each year. We show that an excess share of prime-age US workers experience recurrent separations spaced exactly 12 months apart. These separations coincide with aggregate seasonal downturns and are concentrated in seasonally volatile industries. Examining workers most prone to seasonal work interruptions, we find that these workers incur large earnings losses ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-084

Working Paper
Important Factors Determining Fintech Loan Default: Evidence from the LendingClub Consumer Platform

This study examines key default determinants of fintech loans, using loan-level data from the LendingClub consumer platform during 2007–2018. We identify a robust set of contractual loan characteristics, borrower characteristics, and macroeconomic variables that are important in determining default. We find an important role of alternative data in determining loan default, even after controlling for the obvious risk characteristics and the local economic factors. The results are robust to different empirical approaches. We also find that homeownership and occupation are important factors in ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-15

Working Paper
Manning Up and Womaning Down: How Husbands and Wives Report Earnings When She Earns More

To infer social preferences regarding the relative earnings of spouses, we use measurement error in the earnings reported for married couples in the Current Population Survey. We compare the earnings reported for husbands and wives in the survey with their “true” earnings as reported by their employers to tax authorities. Compared with couples where the wife earns just less than the husband, those where she earns just more are 15.9 percentage points more likely to under-report her relative earnings. This pattern reflects the reporting behavior of both husbands and wives and is consistent ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 28

Discussion Paper
How Does Buy Now, Pay Later Affect Customers’ Credit?

This paper explores the relationship between consumers’ use of buy now, pay later (BNPL) and their credit reports. We conduct this analysis to evaluate concerns that BNPL use could negatively affect consumers’ financial health.
Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers , Paper DP23-01

Report
How do people pay rent?

Using data from the 2014 Boston Fed Bill Payment Experiment and the 2014 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC), we investigate how households pay their rent. We find that the dominant methods for paying rent are cash (22 percent), check (42 percent), and money order (16 percent). Electronic methods are still rarely used, at 8 percent for bank account number payment and 7 percent for online banking bill payment, and less than 2 percent for debit and credit cards. Compared with other large bill payments of more than $200, rental payments are much more likely to be made with paper-based ...
Research Data Report , Paper 16-2

Working Paper
Granular Income Inequality and Mobility using IDDA: Exploring Patterns across Race and Ethnicity

We explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility in the U.S. for a large number of subnational groups defined by race and ethnicity, using granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility, and conditional income growth derived from the universe of tax filers and W-2 recipients that we observe over a two-decade period (1998–2019). We find that income inequality and income growth patterns identified from administrative tax records differ in important ways from those that one might identify in public survey sources. The full set of statistics that we construct is ...
Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers , Paper 095

Working Paper
A Tale of Two Bailouts: Effects of TARP and PPP on Subprime Consumer Debt

High levels of subprime consumer debt can create social problems. We test the effects of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) bailouts during the Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 crisis, respectively, on this debt. We use over 11 million credit bureau observations of individual consumer debt combined with banking, bailout, and local market data. We find that subprime consumers with more TARP institutions in their markets had significantly increased debt burdens following these bailouts. In contrast, PPP bailouts were associated with reduced ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-32

Working Paper
Money, liquidity and welfare

This paper develops an analytically tractable Bewley model of money demand to shed light on some important questions in monetary theory, such as the welfare cost of inflation. It is shown that when money is a vital form of liquidity to meet uncertain consumption needs, the welfare costs of inflation can be extremely large. With log utility and parameter values that best match both the aggregate money demand curve suggested by Lucas (2000) and the variance of household consumption, agents in our model are willing to reduce consumption by 3% ~ 4% to avoid 10% annual inflation. The astonishingly ...
Working Papers , Paper 2014-3

Newsletter
Financial life after the death of a spouse

The death of a spouse results in a considerable decline in average income for the surviving spouse. The Social Security survivors benefits program compensates the surviving spouse, most often a woman, for almost all of the lost income, allowing them to work less, but many widows who are not yet eligible for the program struggle to meet their financial needs.
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 438 , Pages 5

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

Working Paper 32 items

Discussion Paper 5 items

Report 3 items

Newsletter 1 items

Speech 1 items

FILTER BY Author

Roman, Raluca 4 items

Akana, Tom 3 items

Dasgupta, Kabir 3 items

Heggeness, Misty 3 items

Kirkpatrick, Linda 3 items

Plum, Alexander 3 items

show more (93)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

D14 6 items

E21 6 items

J22 5 items

D12 4 items

D31 4 items

show more (68)

FILTER BY Keywords

Labor supply 5 items

Administrative data 3 items

Consumption 3 items

Employment 3 items

Marriage 3 items

Pandemic 3 items

show more (159)

PREVIOUS / NEXT