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Working Paper
Government Transfers and Consumer Spending among Households with Children during COVID-19
Leveraging novel data on consumer credit and debit card spending by Zip code, this study examines how the impact of government transfers on economic well-being varied by household type during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that pandemic transfers disproportionately benefited households with children, buffering them from earnings losses at the pandemic’s start and sustaining spending growth over time. Household essential spending increased proportionally with the delivery of cash transfers, while discretionary spending was influenced more by pandemic-specific factors beyond ...
Working Paper
Job Loss, Credit Card Loans, and the College-persistence Decision of US Working Students
This study assesses the impact of involuntary job loss on college persistence by leveraging different job-loss timings relative to a student’s college enrollment decision. We find that job loss increases the probability that a working college student leaves college before attaining a degree, but access to short-term credit through credit card loans buffers this liquidity effect. By restricting credit supply to college students, the CARD Act of 2009 has inadvertently inhibited the ability of liquidity-constrained students to remain in college when their earnings unexpectedly fall, resulting ...
Working Paper
Wage Inequality and the Rise in Labor Force Exit: The Case of US Prime-Age Men
This article offers the first empirical evidence that labor force exit rates rise when workers’ relative earnings fall. The model takes into account that a job not only provides economic security but also affirms a worker’s social status, which is tied to their relative position in the labor market. Based on the results, the decline in relative earnings for non-college prime-age men over the last four decades is estimated to have raised their labor force exit propensity by 0.49 percentage point, accounting for 44 percent of the total growth in their labor force exit rate during this ...
Report
Credit Access and the College-persistence Decision of Working Students: Policy Implications for New England
This study assesses the effects of involuntary job loss and access to credit card loans on working college students’ decision to either remain in school (college persistence) or drop out. The authors conducted the underlying analysis using national data, but their findings are especially relevant to New England, where higher education employs 4 percent of the region’s workforce—more than twice the national average. College persistence therefore carries implications not only for the individual students, but also for the vitality of the region’s labor market.