We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in US history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics—but not employment dynamics—during the pandemic. Second, benefit expansions allow us to study the MPC of normally low-liquidity households in a high-liquidity state. These households still have high MPCs. This suggests a role for permanent behavioral characteristics, rather than just current liquidity, in driving spending behavior. Third, the mechanisms driving our results imply that temporary benefit supplements are a promising countercyclical tool. (JEL E21, E24, E32, E62, E71, G51, J65)

Townsend, David PhD; Kiser, Jackson W. MD; Boerma, Marjan PhD; Fass, Daniel MD; Wilson, Sean MS, DABR; Sullivan, Daniel MD Author Information

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government implemented the largest expansion in eligibility to federal Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits in history through the creation of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. This program expanded eligibility to self-employed workers, gig workers, independent workers and others not previously eligible for UI or who were unable to work for a variety of COVID related reasons. Once implemented, the PUA program accounted for roughly 40 percent of total claims through expiration (Figure 1) and $80 Billion (20%) of the $400 Billion spent on UI expansions in 2020 (DOL IG, 2021). The PUA program officially ended on September 6, 2021, and 21 states opted to terminate the program in June or July of 2021. When the Omicron surge hit the U.S. in December 2021, it resulted in disruptions in dependent care, widespread quarantines, and a return of virtual school or school cancellations for many children. According to the U.S. Census Household Pulse Survey, the number of individuals who reported not working due to having or caring for someone with COVID-19 increased from 3 million in the first half of December 2021 to almost 9 million between December 29 2021 and January 10 2022, the highest level ever recorded by the survey. With PUA no longer in place in 2022, workers had fewer means of receiving income supports if they lost earnings as a result of these circumstances. What policy lessons can be learned from the “PUA experiment” for policymaking going forward? Specifically, the PUA program marked an important departure in the UI eligibility framework. States would normally rely on employers to verify whether a worker is ineligible for UI if they were fired for cause, did not respond to a recall, or started working in a new job. The PUA program enabled self-employed and other workers to become eligible for UI for many reasons beyond involuntary job loss. The central question when evaluating the PUA program – what was the tradeoff between expanding benefit eligibility versus work disincentive effects or overpayments, as compared to traditional UI recipients?

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. implemented the largest expansion of unemployment insurance (UI) bene ts in its history. Weekly supplemental UI bene ts ranged between $300 to $600 per person. The supplemental $600 nearly tripled the usual bene ts for the median UI recipient, whose resulting total bene ts replaced 145 percent of lost income. The historically high level of bene ts raises two important questions:

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic contraction, the Online Platform Economy served as a crucial source of families’ income. The JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzes changes in supply-side participation in the Online Platform Economy during a period that includes the COVID-19 pandemic, record-level job loss, and expanded unemployment insurance benefits. This research leverages de-identified administrative data from a universe of 30 million Chase deposit account customers and tracks payments from 38 online platforms between April 2018 and June 2021. Dividing the Online Platform Economy into four sectors (transportation, non-transport work, selling, leasing) we find that transportation and leasing platforms experienced greater declines in supply-side participation relative to selling and leasing platforms. Platform workers appear to be particularly vulnerable to economic shocks, as they received unemployment insurance at extremely high rates during the pandemic compared to other groups, and should thus be a priority for policymakers amid the current economic recovery.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in three ways. First, it increased the level of benefits through a $600 and then a $300 per week supplement. Second, it expanded the pool of workers who are eligible to receive UI via the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. Third, it extended the duration of benefits. As the labor market recovers from the COVID-19 recession, policymakers and economists have debated whether generous UI benefits are holding workers back from returning to work. All of these program expansions are scheduled to expire in September 2021. Beginning in May 2021, twenty-six states announced they would end these benefits early at the end of June 2021. These expirations will dramatically change the level of benefits workers receive. Whereas typical UI benefits replace roughly 50 percent of a worker’s wages, with the $300 supplement almost half of jobless workers (48 percent) receive as much or more in UI benefits than their prior wages (Ganong et al. 2020). Additionally, the PUA program has accounted for roughly 40 percent of total UI claims during the pandemic.1 These benefits have been economically important insofar as they have boosted the spending of jobless workers (Greig et al. 2021). This brief aims to answer two important policy questions central to this debate. First, to what extent have the UI supplements discouraged jobless workers from returning to work? We find evidence of a small job search disincentive from the supplements. Second, how well targeted and timely are PUA benefits in insuring against income losses? We find that PUA is successfully targeting income supports to more marginalized workers, specifically younger and lower-income workers. In addition, PUA recipients experience income losses roughly similar to the losses experienced by UI recipients. However, there were significant delays in PUA payments as states administered this new program. A program like PUA may be an increasingly important macroeconomic stabilizer, especially if, during a future recession, payments are delivered more quickly than was the case during the COVID-19 recession. We summarize our key findings in this insight and describe our methodology in more detail in a companion technical note (see Ganong et al. 2021a).

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused historic levels of unemployment and economic hardship while student debt balances are also at record levels. We use administrative banking and credit bureau data to estimate how the benefits of different debt cancellation scenarios would be distributed by household income, borrowers’ remaining time to pay off their debt, and borrower race and ethnicity. We examine four scenarios: (1) universal cancellation of up to $10,000 of every debtor’s balance; (2) cancellation of up to $50,000 of debt for people earning less than $125,000; (3) cancellation of up to $25,000 for people earning less than $75,000 and phasing out at $100,000; and (4) cancellation of up to $50,000 with the same income phase-out as scenario 3. We find that income cut offs significantly reduce the total amount of debt forgiven and make cancellation less regressive, while all cancellation scenarios we examine distribute forgiveness across borrowers by race in roughly the same way. In general, cancellation disproportionately benefits middle- and high-income families, though income targeting makes cancellation less regressive. Most notably, the $25,000 cancellation with income phase-out cancels the same amount of debt as the $10,000 universal cancellation while completely wiping out debt for a higher fraction of low-income borrowers.

This note updates the job-finding analysis in Ganong et al. (2021), estimating the disincentive effect of supplemental unemployment benefits between April 2020 and April 2021. We estimate the causal effect of the supplements using both a difference-in-difference research design and an interrupted time-series research design paired with administrative data. These empirical strategies can be used respectively to identify micro disincentive effects (the effect of increasing benefits for one worker) and macro disincentive effects (the effect of increasing benefits for all workers). Both designs imply a precisely estimated, non-zero disincentive effect. However, the disincentive effect of expanded benefits is quantitatively small: implied duration elasticities are substantially lower than pre-pandemic estimates and suggest that eliminating the supplements would have restored only a small fraction of overall employment losses. Extending the difference-in-difference design through April 2021 suggests that the disincentive effect of the supplements remains modest even after vaccines are broadly available. We conclude that unemployment supplements are not the key driver of the job-finding rate through April 2021 and that U.S. policy was therefore successful in insuring income losses from unemployment with minimal impacts on employment. ∗This paper updates and extends the job search results in “Spending and Job Search Impacts of Expanded Unemployment Benefits: Evidence from Administrative Micro Data”. We thank Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Jon Gruber, Rohan Kekre, Bruce Meyer, Matt Notowidigdo, and Heather Sarsons for helpful conversations, seminar participants at the AEA, BFI China, CFPB, Chicago Booth Micro Lunch, Clemson, Federal Reserve Board, Johns Hopkins, NBER Labor Studies, Montana, OECD, Opportunity Insights, RAND, SED, SOLE, the Upjohn Institute, VMACS, and Yale for suggestions, and Peter Robertson and Katie Zhang for excellent research assistance. This research was made possible by a data-use agreement between three of the authors and the JPMorgan Chase Institute (JPMCI), which has created de-identified data assets that are selectively available to be used for academic research. All statistics from JPMCI data, including medians, reflect cells with multiple observations. The opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not represent the views of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

How did the largest expansion of unemployment benefits in U.S. history affect household behavior? Using anonymized bank account data covering millions of households, we provide new empirical evidence on the spending and job search responses to benefit changes during the pandemic and compare those responses to the predictions of benchmark structural models. We find that spending responds more than predicted, while job search responds an order of magnitude less than predicted. In sharp contrast to normal times when spending falls after job loss, we show that when expanded benefits are available, spending of the unemployed actually rises after job loss. Using quasi-experimental research designs, we estimate a large marginal propensity to consume out of benefits. Notably, spending responses are large even for households who have built up substantial liquidity through prior receipt of expanded benefits. These large responses contrast with a theoretical prediction that spending responses should shrink with liquidity. Simple job search models predict a sharp decline in search in the wake of a substantial benefit expansion, followed by a sustained rebound when benefits expire. We instead find that the job- finding rate is quite stable. Moreover, we document that recall plays an important role in driving job-finding dynamics throughout the pandemic. A model extended to fit these key features of the data implies small job search distortions from expanded unemployment benefits. Jointly, these spending and job finding facts suggest that benefit expansions during the pandemic were a more effective policy than predicted by standard structural models. Abstracting from general equilibrium effects, we find that overall spending was 2.0-2.6 percent higher and employment only 0.2-0.4 percent lower as a result of the benefit expansions.

American families carry more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. This debt provided many with the opportunity to pursue higher education, but remains for others a large, potentially crippling, financial burden. In this report, we explore how people of different socioeconomic groups are managing their student debt. We do this by linking administrative banking data, credit bureau records, and public records on race and ethnicity to create a unique data asset that includes the income, demographics, debt balances, and student loan payments of 301,583 individuals. In general, we find that borrowers of socioeconomic groups tend to manage student loans quite differently, often relying heavily on others—children, parents, and spouses—in order to manage their debt. In particular, we find that while the median borrower is not unduly burdened by their debt, a significant minority of lower-income and younger borrowers are heavily burdened, required to make payments that constitute more than 10 percent of their take-home income. We also find that almost 40 percent of those involved in student debt repayment are making payments on other people’s loans, with 27 percent of those involved holding no student debt whatsoever. These outside helpers play a key role in helping borrowers make progress on their loan. Nevertheless, we find that low-income and older borrowers are more likely to be several months behind on their payments, and 7 percent of all borrowers not in deferral are on track to never pay off their loans. These dynamics of repayment put Black borrowers at a disadvantage, who, relative to White borrowers, have lower incomes and higher debt balances and are 4 times as likely to have no payments made against their loans, partly due to the fact that they are less likely to receive repayment help. This debt provided many with the opportunity to pursue higher education with commensurate income keeping debt burdens at reasonable rates. For others, student loan debt remains a large financial burden relative to income. In this report, we explore how people of different socioeconomic groups are managing their student debt.

To report our clinical experience of a dose escalation study using total marrow irradiation (TMI) with volumetric arc therapy (VMAT) as a part of conditioning regimen in a Phase I/II study of patients with hematologic malignancies receiving second allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT). From December 2015 to November 2019, eighteen patients with hematologic malignancies undergoing second allo-SCT were treated with Linac based VMAT technique using 6 MV photon. TMI doses were given twice daily, 1.5 Gy per fraction with total dose starting with 6 Gy, 9 Gy and 12 Gy. A CT simulation was obtained from head to mid-femur. The gross target volume (GTV) consists of all bones excluding mandible, arms and lower extremities mid-femur down. A 3 mm margin was added to generate planning target volume (PTV). PTV was divided in 3 sub-targets: head/neck, thorax, and pelvis. One VMAT plan for each sub-target was optimized iteratively utilizing the adjacent plans as the base plans to account for their dose contributions to each other. PTV coverage for head/neck V99%, thorax V95% and pelvis V99% were all at least 95% while global hot spot was kept under 140% of the prescription dose. Across all dose levels, mean doses to brain, heart, lungs, bowel, liver, kidneys, eyes, oral cavity, lenses and body were respectively 63.9, 57.0, 68.3, 53.4, 59.8, 52.5, 40.6, 33.5, 27.7, and 62.1% of the prescription dose. In the 6 patients treated in the 12 Gy cohort, average mean lung dose (MLD) was 7.6 Gy (7.3-8.2 Gy), a dose reduction of 21% as compared to 9.9 Gy, lung toxicity predictor for traditional total body irradiation (TBI) technique. Mucositis is the main concern of the conditioning regimen, and it was capture on day 7, 14, 21 and 28 post-transplant as the main dose limited toxifies. The mean follow-up after TMI was 19 months (range: 2-125 months). The first patient suffered from grade 3 mucositis as DLT at the 9 Gy level, nevertheless, the oral cavity mean dose was only 46% of the prescription dose for that patient. The following 5 patient at level 9 Gy did not have DLT. So far, one of 5 patients at the level 12 Gy suffered from DLT of Grade 3 mucositis, but not other 4 patients, we are enrolling the 6th patient to the level of 12 Gy to define the maximal tolerated dose (MTD). There was no other DLT observed so far during the DLT period. Likely, 12 Gy will be declared as MTD. No lung reaction or any other toxicities were observed in the other 18 patients treated in this study. At time of last follow-up 13 out of 18 patients showed no evidence of disease. This study concludes that VMAT-TMI up to 12 Gy is feasible and well tolerated in the 18-patient cohort treated in this study. Encouraging low rates of toxicity and transplant results warrant treatment and the next dose level of 15Gy BID.

Unemployment benefits have played an unprecedented role in the U.S. economy as a result of record high job losses and the authorization of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The CARES Act authorized a $600-per-week supplement, which hugely increased the value of unemployment benefits, such that the median jobless worker received unemployment benefits equal to 145% of their pre-job loss wages compared to 50% in normal times. The $600 weekly supplement expired at the end of July, however, causing the total value of unemployment benefits paid out to fall by 52 percent between July and August. In this paper, we present evidence that the increased unemployment benefits boosted both spending and savings among the unemployed and that upon the expiration of the $600 benefit supplement in August, families receiving unemployment benefits sharply cut spending and dipped into savings. Our first finding shows that spending of the unemployed increased by 22 percent upon receipt of unemployment benefits and declined by 14 percent in August with the expiration of the $600 supplement. Our second finding shows that the unemployed roughly doubled their liquid savings over the four month period between March and July 2020 but then spent two-thirds of the accumulated savings in August alone. Eventually, without further government support or significant labor market improvements, jobless workers may exhaust their accumulated savings buffer, leaving them with a choice to further cut spending or fall behind on debt or rent payments.

We estimate the impact of shale gas development on particulate matter pollution using a quasi-experimental setting in Pennsylvania where some wells were developed to produce natural gas whereas other wells were permitted but not drilled. In doing so, we utilize a novel empirical approach drawing upon insights from atmospheric chemistry to account for windblown pollution spillovers in a difference-in-differences framework. Utilizing a high frequency, high resolution satellite-based measure of PM pollution between 2000 and 2018, we identify causal increases in PM2.5 concentration ranging from 0.017 & mu;g/m(3) to 0.062 & mu;g/m(3) in the vicinity of over 20,000 wells, resulting in approximately 20 additional deaths between 2010 and 2017.

While the costs of environmental policies are generally thought to be regressive, the distribution of benefits is less understood. This paper explores the incidence of an unexpected decrease in air pollution in metropolitan Los Angeles by estimating the resulting change in housing costs and neighborhood demographics. The decrease in air pollution was caused jointly by the California Electricity Crisis of 2000 and the RECLAIM cap-and-trade program for NOx emissions and impacted neighborhoods differentially based on their location relative to major polluters and local wind patterns. I measure local exposure to this pollution shock using a dispersion model developed by atmospheric scientists which calculates the effect of individual firms’ emissions on the air quality of nearby locations. The estimates show that (a) housing rents increase significantly and as much as house prices; (b) 9% of low-income households leave the sample area due to improved air quality; and (c) low-income households are rarely home owners who would benefit from increased housing wealth. I show that a standard residential sorting model predicts that when low-income residents respond to improved amenities by leaving, the distribution of benefits from the improvement is likely regressive. Together, these results suggest that the distribution of benefits from improved air quality likely favors higher-income households. ∗Resources for the Future, Washington, D.C. Email: sullivan@rff.org. I am grateful to David Cutler, Edward Glaeser, Lawrence Katz, and Robert Stavins, for their feedback. I also thank Spencer Banzhaf, John Coglianese, Timothy Layton, Jing Li, Jonathan Libgober, Amanda Pallais, Christopher Palmer, Jisung Park, Parag Pathak, Daniel Pollmann, James Stock, and Margaret Walls, as well as seminar participants at Harvard, BYU, Notre Dame, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Resources for the Future, and Camp Resources XXIII.

OF THE DISCLOSURE This invention relates to a process for the blow-ex trusion of clear water dispersible polyvinyl alcohol tub ing. A critical plasticized polyvinyl alcohol composition having a residual acetate content of from 25 to 40% by weight is melted at temperatures in the range of 375 to 425 F. to form a plastic mass having a viscosity within the range of 100 to 20,000 poises. This material is ex truded through a ring die and blown while in the plastic state. Upon cooling; a thin wall, continuous, non-tacky film is obtained. This application is a divisional application of our co pending application Ser. No. 297,075, filed July 23, 1963, and now U.S. Patent 3,365,413. This invention relates to the production of polyvinyl alcohol film by a blow-extrusion process. It is more par ticularly concerned with the production of a completely clear film which is readily soluble in water. Many of the synthetic resins available on the market have been subjected to blow-extrusion processes for the formation of thin-walled tubes which can be used in that form or which are subsequently slit to give useful film. These processes and products are described in consider able detail in such U.S. patents as Nos. 2,461,975, 2,461,976, 2,632,206 and so on. This and other related art set out methods which may be generally applicable to many resin plastics but, in some cases, even those highly skilled in the art are unable to apply these teachings to all such materials. This latter observation is especially applicable to polyvinyl alcohol. Polyvinyl alcohol is a resin with special properties which make it an extremely valuable product for many commercial applications. Among these properties is its rather unsual characteristic of being soluble in cold wa ter. The production of a polyvinyl alcohol film which re tains its water solubility is something which is much de sired. Cast films of polyvinyl alcohol have been prepared from solutions of the resin but the method involved is rather slow and expensive. In addition, the minimum gauge of film obtainable by the casting method is rela tively large. Unfortunately, the known methods of blow-extrusion cannot be applied to polyvinyl alcohol to give success ful products without first being extensively modified. Or dinary practice produces film which may lack flexibility to the extent of being brittle, especially at low tempera tures and under conditions of varying humidity. The solubility in water may be impaired to an inoperative degree. The film may have a rough surface. Or it may be covered with holes, bubbles and opaque specks. Attempts to correct these unacceptable defects often result in degra dation of the polyvinyl alcohol. An even more important requirement for blow-extrusion is to have a material which will neither be too stiff to extrude nor be so fluid as to resist the feed action of an extruder screw or simi lar device commonly used for this purpose. 5

This paper presents evidence that current research significantly underestimates the effects of air pollution because conventional methods cannot account for sharp changes in pollution over short distances or the wind-driven dispersion of pollutants. I use a state-of-the-art atmospheric dispersion model, which solves these problems, with a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of NOx exposure on house prices in metropolitan Los Angeles. The wind-based estimate is over 10 times larger than conventional estimates and implies the value of RECLAIM, the local cap-and-trade program underlying the natural experiment, is roughly $502 million per year. *Resources for the Future, Washington, DC (email: sullivan@rff.org). I am especially grateful to David Cutler, Edward Glaeser, Lawrence Katz, and Robert Stavins for their feedback. I also thank Spencer Banzhaf, John Coglianese, Timothy Layton, Jing Li, Jonathan Libgober, Amanda Pallais, Christopher Palmer, Jisung Park, Daniel Pollmann, and James Stock, as well as seminar participants at Harvard, BYU, Notre Dame, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Resources for the Future, and Camp Resources XXIII. Funding from the National Institute on Aging, through Grant Number T32-AG000186 to the National Bureau of Economic Research, is gratefully acknowledged. House price capitalization is routinely used to measure the social value of local amenities which lack an explicit market. But the case of air pollution presents a puzzle: house prices do not seem to respond very much to air pollution. Smith and Huang (1995) note that improved air quality affects house prices much less than would be expected given the health benefits. More recent studies, including those using quasi-experimental research designs, have not resolved this puzzle.1 Deepening the confusion is a large literature which finds house prices to be very responsive to many other locational amenities, including school quality (Black 1999; Cellini, Ferreira, and Rothstein 2010); crime risk (Linden and Rockoff 2008; Pope 2008); and local cancer risk (Davis 2004). What is different about air pollution, a disamenity whose negative value has been well established in other contexts?2 In this paper, I present evidence that air quality does have a large effect on house prices and that estimates of the impact of air pollution exposure can be severely biased by poor measures of exposure. Unlike other economic variables, there are no large-sample data on air pollution exposure, so common measures of exposure are fairly coarse geographically. However, pollution concentrations can change dramatically over distances as short as a quarter mile. Pollution spikes around highways and polluting firms, particularly in the area just downwind of the pollution source. Coarse measurements of pollution exposure are unable to account for granular changes in exposure or the wind-driven distribution of pollution, resulting in significant measurement error and biased regression estimates. Moreover, the nature of this measurement error is such that natural experiments do not necessarily remove the resulting bias. For example, in a geographic differencein-differences research design using distance to define treatment status, the assumed treatment and control groups are contaminated because most pollution travels downwind, making many “control” households heavily treated and vice versa. Similarly, interpolations of pollution monitor data, which are often used to measure local exposure, do not capture the many local spikes in pollution caused by firms located 1. For example, Chay and Greenstone (2005) report a marginal willingness to pay to reduce pollution in line with Smith and Huang (1995). See Section 1 for further discussion. 2. Neidell (2009) and Moretti and Neidell (2011) find that attendance at outdoor attractions drops precipitously in response to pollution alerts. Qin and Zhu (2015) find that Internet searches in Chinese cities for “emigration” spike on high pollution days.

Consumers often rely on lawyers to make complicated legal decisions, though in many cases the lawyer's financial interests are at odds with those of the client. We consider this general problem in the context of consumers filing for bankruptcy. Lawyers advise debtors on whether to file the cheaper Chapter 7 filing or the more expensive Chapter 13 filing. Bankruptcy courts that allow lawyers to charge more for Chapter 13 bankruptcy see a significantly larger fraction of Chapter 13 filings (elasticity of 0.3). This is true controlling for a host of demographic controls at the zip code level, as well as with state fixed effects and district policy controls. Our estimates suggest that 5.4% of cross-district variation in relative Chapter 13 rates could be eliminated by harmonizing relative fees.

Two strategies to interrogate the insulin growth factor 1 receptor (IGF-1R) pathway were investigated: vertical inhibition with dalotuzumab and MK-2206 or ridaforolimus to potentiate PI3K pathway targeting and horizontal cross-talk inhibition with dalotuzumab and MK-0752 to exert effects against cellular proliferation, angiogenesis, and stem cell propagation. A phase I, multi-cohort dose escalation study was conducted in patients with advanced solid tumours. Patients received dalotuzumab (10 mg kg–1) and escalating doses of MK-2206 (90–200 mg) or escalating doses of dalotuzumab (7.5–10 mg kg–1) and MK-0752 (1800 mg) weekly. Upon maximum tolerated dose determination, patients with low-RAS signature, high-IGF1 expression ovarian cancer were randomised to dalotuzumab/MK-2206 versus dalotuzumab/ridaforolimus, whereas patients with high IGF1/low IGF2 expression colorectal cancer received dalotuzumab/MK-0752. A total of 47 patients were enrolled: 29 in part A (18 in the dalotuzumab/MK-2206 arm and 11 in the dalotuzumab/MK-0752 arm) and 18 in part B (6 in each arm). Dose-limiting toxicities (DLTs) for dalotuzumab/MK-2206 included grade 4 neutropenia and grade 3 serum sickness-like reaction, maculopapular rash, and gastrointestinal inflammation. For dalotuzumab/MK-0752, DLTs included grade 3 dehydration, rash, and diarrhoea. Seven patients remained on study for >4 cycles. Dalotuzumab/MK-2206 and dalotuzumab/MK-0752 combinations were tolerable. Further developments of prospectively validated predictive biomarkers to aid in patient selection for anti-IGF-1R therapies are needed.