Does monetary policy influence who becomes a homeowner? Lower-income home buyers may be more sensitive to interest rates, at least in part because they more frequently come up against binding payment-to-income ratio constraints in credit decisions. Exploiting the timing of high-frequency observations of individual mortgage rate locks around monetary policy shocks, I find that a 1 percentage point policy-induced increase in mortgage rates lowers the presence of lower-income households in the population of home buyers by 1 to 2 percentage points immediately following the shock. Effects are substantially stronger among first-time home buyers and persist for approximately one year.
This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work-the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from office-affects employee attitudes and performance. Workers who spent around two days in the office each week on average self-reported greater work-life balance, more job satisfaction, and lower isolation from colleagues compared to workers who spent more or fewer days in the office. Employees in the intermediate hybrid condition received no different performance ratings compared to peers who spent more or fewer days in the office.
In 2001, a large and sustained supply shock halted a heroin epidemic in Australia. We use drug offenses to identify individual opioid users and examine how the shock affected their mortality risks and criminal activity over the next eight years. Initially, gains from fewer overdoses are offset by drug substitution and more crime, including homicides. Most adverse effects dissipate over time, whereas persistent mortality reductions save the lives of around one in 48 individuals in our sample. Our results demonstrate that reducing the supply of illicit opioids can lead to meaningful longer-term improvements, even when the short-term effects are ambiguous.
Abstract We examine the preferences of low-income households in Kenya over the structure of unconditional cash transfers. Most preferred lumpy transfers, and some preferred deferred receipt—in contrast to the typical structures of safety-net programs, but consistent with evidence on the financial challenges of poverty. Turning to consequences, receiving transfers later in the year raised income 1.5 years later—but willingness to defer receipt was sensitive to small changes in cash flow around the time of decision-making. Taken together, these results illustrate how adapting cash transfer design to the decision-making environment of those in poverty could improve financial choices and outcomes.
Abstract The US trade war against China can either enhance or diminish American soft power in China, depending on whether Chinese citizens view it as legitimate. We study how US movie viewership, a measure of American soft power, responds to the trade war. We find a significantly greater reduction in US movie viewership in regions more exposed to the Trump tariffs, but no corresponding decline in non-US movies. The decline is stronger for action and drama movies, which tend to embody greater perceived “Americanness.” Survey data also show a sharper decline in trust in Americans in more tariff-exposed regions.
