Research

Publications and Accepted Papers:

Economic Effects of Medicaid Expansion in Michigan, with John Ayanian, Donald Grimes, and Helen Levy, New England Journal of Medicine, 376;5. 2017.

 Medicaid expansion in Michigan is estimated to create more than 30,000 jobs per year and to produce a net positive effect on the state budget each year from fiscal 2016 to 2021.

Metropolitan Land Values, with David Albouy and Minchul Shin, Review of Economics and Statistics, 100(3), July 2018, pp. 454-456.

We use market transactions to estimate the value of all urban land in U.S. metropolitan areas. Land values totaled $28 trillion in 2006, more than two times GDP.

Housing Productivity and the Social Cost of Land-Use Restrictions, with David Albouy, Journal of Urban Economics, 107, September 2018, pp. 101-120.

Land-use restrictions drive a wedge between the cost of housing and the price of housing inputs. The costs of land-use regulations outweigh associated quality-of-life benefits.

Minding Your Ps and Qs: Going from Micro to Macro in Measuring Prices and Quantities, with John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, David Johnson, and Matthew Shapiro, AEA Papers and Proceedings 109, May 2019.

New data sources offer great promise to re-engineer key national output and price indices using item-level data.

Macroeconomic Feedback Effects of Medicaid Expansion: Evidence from Michigan, with Helen Levy, John Ayanian, Thomas Buchmueller, and Donald Grimes, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 45(1), February 2020.

Re-engineering Key National Economic Indicators, with John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, David Johnson, and Matthew Shapiro. Paper prepared for NBER/CRIW Conference Big Data for 21st Century Economic Statistics (Bethesda, March 2019). Forthcoming.

Firms and Collective Reputation: a Study of the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal, with Ruediger Bachmann, Ying Fan, Dimitrije Ruzic, and Benjamin Leard (accepted, Journal of the European Economic Association).

The 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal reduced consumer valuations of the other German automakers' vehicles by an average of $2,057 and led to  a 34.6% reduction in their sales. 

Wage Rigidity and Employment Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Data, with Joshua Montes (accepted, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics).

Establishments with greater measured downward nominal wage rigidity exhibit higher layoff rates, and lower quit and hire rates.

Revisions Requested:

Do Large-Scale Refinancing Programs Reduce Mortgage Defaults? Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity Design, with Jeffrey Perry (second set of revisions requested, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy).

 A regression discontinuity design indicates that reducing mortgage payment size by 1 percent lowers conditional default rates by 1.55 percent.

Working Papers:

Quality Adjustment at Scale: Hedonic vs. Exact Demand-Based Price Indices, with John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, David Johnson, Ed Olivares, Luke Pardue, Matthew Shapiro, and Laura Yi Zhao

We explore hedonic and demand-based approaches for adjusting price indices for quality change at scale. We find evidence of substantial quality-adjustment in prices for a wide range of goods including high-tech consumer products and food products.

Using Machine Learning to Construct Hedonic Price Indices, with Mike Cafarella, Tian Gao, John Haltiwanger, Matthew Shapiro, and Laura Yi Zhao

We use natural language processing and machine learning methods to construct hedonic price indices from scanner data. Cumulative food inflation over the period 2007 to 2015 is reduced by half owing to quality adjustment. 

Public Debt Levels and Real Interest Rates: Causal Evidence from Parliamentary Elections, with Aditi Thapar.

A one percentage point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio increases real long-term interest rates by 5.6 basis points.

Are Entry Wages Really (Nominally) Flexible?, with Matthew Hall and Joshua Montes.

        No, entry wages simply appear flexible because of composition bias.

Housing Demand, Cost-of-Living Inequality, and the Affordability Crisis, with David Albouy and Yingyi Liu.

The share of household expenditures on housing has risen since 1970, and expenditure shares on housing are higher in areas where housing is more expensive. Those patterns are inconsistent with the assumption of Cobb-Douglas preferences over housing and other goods.

Older (Resting) Papers:

Price and Time to Sale Dynamics in the Housing Market: the Role of Incomplete Information.

Homeowners' misperceptions regarding movements in house prices are associated with variation in sales volumes in the housing market.

The Distribution of Urban Land Values: Evidence from Market Transactions, with David Albouy.

Land values measured from market transactions are consistent with several predictions of the standard monocentric city model. The estimates suggest land receives approximately seven percent of national income and the cost elasticity with respect to urban population is about fourteen percent.

Modeling the Budgetary Effects of FHA's Single Family Mortgage Insurance (short version here), with Francesca Castelli, Damien Moore, and Jeffrey Perry.

A background paper explaining how CBO estimates the budgetary costs of FHA's single family mortgage insurance. Includes a discussion of the difference between the budgetary and fair-value costs of FHA insurance.