Working Papers

Money to Burn: Crowdfunding Wildfire Recovery with Tony Cookson & Philip Mulder

Person-to-person charity has grown substantially in recent years, yet little is known about who benefits from it. This paper uses micro data on crowdfunding campaigns after a major wildfire to ask whether donors give according to the comparative needs of beneficiaries. Linking to personal financial data and holding losses fixed, we find that beneficiaries in the top-tercile of the income distribution receive 25% more support and are more likely to have a campaign than beneficiaries with incomes in the bottom-tercile. As we document, high-income beneficiaries possess several network advantages when soliciting crowdfunding. Conditional on income and losses, more crowdfunding is associated with faster recovery. Nationally, crowdfunding campaigns raise more contributions in higher-income and more economically connected zipcodes. These findings imply that crowdfunded private charity likely exacerbates income inequalities in the recovery process.

Coverage Neglect in Homeowners Insurance with Tony Cookson & Philip Mulder  (draft available upon request, formally "Shopping for Underinsurance") 

Most homeowners do not have enough insurance coverage to rebuild their house after a total loss. Using contract-level data from 24 homeowners insurance companies in Colorado, we show that widespread underinsurance is largely driven by differences in average coverage limits across insurers, as opposed to policyholder characteristics, and is enabled by homeowner inattention to coverage limits (coverage neglect). Underinsurance matters for disaster recovery. Across households that lost homes to a major wildfire, 10 p.p. higher underinsurance is associated with a 5 p.p. decline in the likelihood of filing a rebuilding permit within a year of the loss. We build a discrete choice insurance demand model to understand why consumers select underinsured policies. Our model shows that consumers value lower premiums while neglecting coverage limits. Under a counterfactual without coverage neglect, annual average consumer surplus increases by $300. 

Works in Progress

Death by a Thousand Cuts: Can an Underweighting of Small Shocks Help Explain Household Savings? with Lina Han & Jorge Sabat (old version linked, RCT in the field)

Trailer Park Trapped? The Impact of Mobile Home Park Acquisitions on Residents with Lauren Lambie-Hansen & Philip White (data analysis stage) 

Papers in Eternal Sleep

Get Out While the Getting's Good? A Test of First-Mover Behavior in Bond Funds with Xiaowen Hu (2021)

Health Insurance as an Income Stabilizer (2020)