Financial Literacy Seminar Series | Ran Abramitzky
Book and New Paper
Prof. Abramitzky discussed his book Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success and his new paper, “The Immigrant-Native Incarceration Gap in the United States: 1870-2020.”
BIO
Ran Abramitzky is Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor of Economics and the Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at Stanford University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a former co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. Weaving his family story together with extensive economic and historical data, Abramitzky’s prize-winning book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz examines how communities based on income equality survived in Israel for over a century, and the conditions under which more equal societies can thrive.
Financial Literacy Seminar Series | Michael Weber
Abstract:
We propose a unique setting to test regularities about the recall of economic signals and the formation of subjective economic expectations in the field. For a large sample of US households, we observe the full set of prices and price changes of grocery goods purchased over a calendar year (memory databases) as well as their present-day recalled and expected inflation. Consistent with selective recall, observing fewer and larger (more salient) price changes leads to recall and expect higher inflation. We find evidence of proactive interference, whereby agents mistakenly recall older prices and hence lower prices than they actually paid, and retroactive interference, whereby agents rely less on the price changes stored in their memory database to form beliefs if other contexts associated with prices are cued exogenously. Our results support models of beliefs formation in which memory is a cognitive microfoundation.
Financial Literacy Seminar Series | Keisha Solomon
BIO:
Keisha Solomon is a research scientist based at Howard University. With a Ph.D. in Economics from Temple University, Keisha has established herself as an expert in applied microeconomist with a special interest in mental health, substance use, policy evaluation, causal inference, labor economics, and health equity.
ABSTRACT:
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) created new health insurance options for many individuals and increased protection from unaffordable health care expenses. Research demonstrates how public health insurance improved the economic well-being of households overall. But whether there are specific benefits to households not yet eligible for Medicare but potentially with high health care needs is less understood. This research examines how the availability of public health insurance affects the economic security of below median income households aged 45 through 64. We test if Medicaid access affects unexpected out-of-pocket healthcare spending and financial hardship for households approaching retirement using the 2013 through 2019 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED). Based on state-level decisions to expand Medicaid access, we find increases in health insurance coverage but little difference in out-of-pocket spending or financial hardship for these households approaching retirement.
Financial Literacy Seminar Series | Carlo Wix
Bio
Carlo Wix is a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Board in the Division of Supervision and Regulation (Policy Effectiveness and Assessment Section). His research interests are in banking regulation, financial intermediation, and consumer credit.
Abstract
We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify redistribution between consumers in retail financial markets. Comparing cards with and without rewards, we find that, regardless of income, sophisticated individuals profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers. To probe the underlying mechanisms, we exploit bank-initiated account limit increases at the card level and show that reward cards induce more spending, leaving naive consumers with higher unpaid balances. Naive consumers also follow a sub-optimal balance-matching heuristic when repaying their credit cards, incurring higher costs. Banks incentivize the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable cards without rewards. We estimate an aggregate annual redistribution of $15 billion from less to more educated, poorer to richer, and high to low minority areas, widening existing disparities.
Financial Literacy Seminar Series | Xavier Jaravel
Abstract:
In this paper, we estimate the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) in an experiment allocating monetary transfers at random to a sample representative of the population of French households. Our experiment provides 300 euro gift cards to participants, with three types of cards: (i) type 1 has no restrictions; (ii) type 2 expires three weeks after the date of receipt; (iii) type 3 has an automatic 10% negative interest rate at the end of each week. We study the participants’ spending behavior on the gift card and estimate their overall MPC using linked, comprehensive bank account data. We find that the MPC is much larger when the gift card features negative interest rates or an expiration date. We discuss the extent to which these findings are informative for macroeconomic models as well as for policy, e.g. for the design of direct transfers to households using central bank digital currency.
Bio:
Dr. Xavier Jaravel is an Associate Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he teaches public economics and how to use micro data and methods to answer macro questions. His research focuses on innovation and productivity, with related work on trade and applied econometrics. He is also a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis, a non-partisan body which advises the Prime Minister, and the 2019 recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize.