January 24, 2025
The Targeting of Place-Based Policies: The New Markets Tax Credit Versus Opportunity Zones
Abstract For a place-based policy to succeed, it must target the right areas—typically those with lower economic development and resident well-being. The U.S. has two major place-based tax policies: the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC), where government-approved entities select investments, and Opportunity Zones (OZs), where private investors choose projects. Despite underlying design differences, both target…
January 8, 2025
Menu Adjustment in Response to the Minimum Wage: A Return to the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Border
Abstract This paper studies how output prices are affected by increases in the minimum wage. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first examination of how the prices of an entire menu of items at a single business adjust in response to a minimum wage increase. Using data we gather from a fast-food…
December 30, 2024
Coverage, Counter-cyclicality and Targeting of Work Requirement Waivers in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Abstract Non-disabled, working age adults without children are required to work 20 hours per week in order to maintain eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. However, states may waive the work requirement for areas that meet conditions reflective of a weak labor market. We construct a dataset with the waiver status of each United…
December 4, 2024
Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.
Abstract We analyze changes in pedestrian behavior over a 30-year period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Building on William Whyte’s observational work from 1980, where he manually recorded pedestrian behaviors, we employ computer vision and deep learning techniques to examine video footage from 1979-80 and 2008-10. Our analysis…
December 2, 2024
Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
Abstract We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological progress inherently impossible in construction. What stopped it? We present…
November 19, 2024
Low-Rise Multifamily and Housing Supply: A Case Study of Seattle
Abstract We provide an in-depth case study of land use reforms in Seattle to highlight how redevelopment of aging single-family housing to townhomes can lead to a significant increase in market-rate housing that promotes affordability. The key is to allow market forces to use by-right zoning to drive small-scale development, when also supported by clear…
November 7, 2024
Introducing the “More Accurate Consumer Price Index”
Abstract Particularly since the 1990s, federal statistical agencies have worked to improve the ability ofvarious price indexes to measure changes in the cost of living. However, in recent years, somehave sent mixed signals to researchers about the relative merits of different measures. As aresult, academic and policy researchers routinely use theoretically and empirically inferior priceindexes…
October 22, 2024
Poverty, Hardship, and Government Transfers
Abstract We examine how the well-being of those with few resources changed, amidst economic disruption and large, transitory government transfers. We find that in the years leading up to the pandemic and in 2020, the patterns for income and consumption poverty were very similar. In 2021 and 2022, however, changes in income and consumption poverty…
August 29, 2024
The Distribution of Social Capital across Individuals and its Relationship to Income
Abstract There have been several attempts to measure social capital—the value inhering in relationships—at an aggregate level, but researchers lack comprehensive individual-level social capital measures. Using a combination of direct linkage and imputation across several nationally representative datasets, we produce a comprehensive measure of social capital at the individual level. We validate our measure by…
August 28, 2024
Race, Ethnicity, and Measurement Error
Abstract Large literatures have analyzed racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes and access to the safety net. For such analyses that rely on survey data, it is crucial that survey accuracy does not vary by race and ethnicity. Otherwise, the observed disparities may be confounded by differences in survey error. In this paper, we…