Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Morocco

By Bruno Crépon, Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, and William Parienté

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco in 2006. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a loan, and none in control villages did. Among households identified as mo...

Microcredit Impacts: Evidence from a Randomized Microcredit Program Placement Experiment by Compartamos Banco

By Manuela Angelucci, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use a clustered randomized trial, and over 16,000 household surveys, to estimate impacts at the community level from a group lending expansion at 110 percent APR by the largest microlender in Mexico. We find no evidence of transformative impacts on 37 ...

Is There a Link between Foreclosure and Health?

By Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

We investigate the relationship between foreclosures and hospital visits using data on all foreclosures and all hospital and emergency room visits from four states that were among the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. We find that living in a neighbo...

Bankruptcy as Implicit Health Insurance

By Neale Mahoney

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper examines the implicit health insurance that households receive from the ability to declare bankruptcy. Exploiting multiple sources of variation in asset exemption law, I show that uninsured households with a greater financial cost of bankrup...

Thar SHE Blows? Gender, Competition, and Bubbles in Experimental Asset Markets

By Catherine C. Eckel and Sascha C. Füllbrunn

American Economic Review, February 2015

Do women and men behave differently in financial asset markets? Our results from an asset market experiment show a marked gender difference in producing speculative price bubbles. Mixed markets show intermediate values, and a meta-analysis of 35 market...

Inequality, Leverage, and Crises

By Michael Kumhof, Romain Rancière, and Pablo Winant

American Economic Review, March 2015

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can be caused by changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase ...

Debt Relief and Debtor Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Consumer Bankruptcy Protection

By Will Dobbie and Jae Song

American Economic Review, March 2015

Consumer bankruptcy is one of the largest social insurance programs in the United States, but little is known about its impact on debtors. We use 500,000 bankruptcy filings matched to administrative tax and foreclosure data to estimate the impact of Chapt...

Do Opposites Detract? Intrahousehold Preference Heterogeneity and Inefficient Strategic Savings

By Simone Schaner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2015

This paper uses a field experiment to test whether intrahousehold heterogeneity in discount factors leads to inefficient strategic savings behavior. I gave married couples in rural Kenya the opportunity to open both joint and individual bank accounts at r...

The Housing Market(s) of San Diego

By Tim Landvoigt, Monika Piazzesi, and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review, April 2015

This paper uses an assignment model to understand the cross section of house prices within a metro area. Movers' demand for housing is derived from a life-cycle problem with credit market frictions. Equilibrium house prices adjust to assign houses that di...

The Great Recession and Credit Trends across Income Groups

By Gene Amromin and Leslie McGranahan

American Economic Review, May 2015

In this paper, we document trends in credit use across income groups in the period surrounding the Great Recession. We investigate trends in access to different credit markets, including mortgages, home equity, automobiles, and student loans. We disentang...

Testing for the Disposition Effect on Optimal Stopping Decisions

By Jacopo Magnani

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper develops a new laboratory test of the hypothesis that individual investors sell winners too early and ride losers too long. In the experiment, subjects invest in a risky asset, whose price evolves in near-continuous time, and they are provided ...

Bankruptcy Rates among NFL Players with Short-Lived Income Spikes

By Kyle Carlson, Joshua Kim, Annamaria Lusardi, and Colin F. Camerer

American Economic Review, May 2015

We test for consumption smoothing using bankruptcy data on players in the National Football League (NFL), who typically earn several million dollars during an income spike that lasts a few years. The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that players should save...

Liquidity in Retirement Savings Systems: An International Comparison

By John Beshears, James J. Choi, Joshua Hurwitz, David Laibson, and Brigitte C. Madrian

American Economic Review, May 2015

We compare the liquidity that six developed countries have built into their employer-based defined contribution (DC) retirement schemes. In Germany, Singapore, and the UK, withdrawals are essentially banned no matter what kind of transitory income shock t...

Connecting Student Loans to Labor Market Outcomes: Policy Lessons from Chile

By Harald Beyer, Justine Hastings, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman

American Economic Review, May 2015

Rising student loan default rates and protests over debt suggest that many students make college enrollment and financing choices they regret. Policymakers have considered tying the availability of federally subsidized loans at degree programs to financia...

Household Asset Allocation, Offspring Education, and the Sandwich Generation

By Vicki L. Bogan

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper finds households with children and elderly dependents, the "Sandwich Generation," significantly reduce both college savings and stockholding. Having any elderly dependents decreases the probability of both stockholding and college savings by tw...

FOMC Forward Guidance and Investor Beliefs

By Arunima Sinha

American Economic Review, May 2015

This paper considers the effect of different dimensions of the FOMC's forward guidance on ex ante investor expectations about future changes in US Treasury yields. Options and Futures data for 2- and 10-year Treasuries is used to extract State-Price Densi...

The Effect of Income on Religiousness

By Thomas Buser

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015

How does income affect religiousness? Using self-collected survey data, we estimate the effects of income on religious behavior. As a source of exogenous income variation we use a change in the eligibility criteria for a government cash transfer in Ecuado...

Referrals: Peer Screening and Enforcement in a Consumer Credit Field Experiment

By Gharad Bryan, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

Empirical evidence on peer intermediation lags behind both theory and practice in which lenders use peers to mitigate adverse selection and moral hazard. Using a referral incentive under individual liability, we develop a two-stage field experiment that p...

Complex Tax Incentives

By Johannes Abeler and Simon Jäger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2015

How does complexity affect people's reaction to tax changes? To answer this question, we conduct an experiment in which subjects work for a piece rate and face taxes. One treatment features a simple tax system, the other a complex one. Subjects' economic ...

Yours, Mine, and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples?

By Alessandra Voena

American Economic Review, August 2015

This paper examines how divorce laws affect couples' intertemporal choices and well-being. Exploiting panel variation in US laws, I estimate the parameters of a model of household decision-making. Household survey data indicate that the introduction of un...