Suchergebnisse

Rates of US homeownership have declined in the past two decades, and the decline has been especially pronounced for young adults. Motivated by recent research that explores the ways in which personal experiences can affect financial attitudes and beliefs, we explore whether the negative homeownership experiences of parents during the 2008 financial crisis could have caused their children to view homeownership less favorably. We find that parental mortgage distress negatively correlates with the probability that a child will purchase a home, and we explore various channels through which this link may occur.

One way a household might handle financial distress is to relocate to another area that offers greater income opportunities. This article examines the impact of geographic mobility on consumer finances by focusing on the residents of "boom towns"—areas that saw a surge of growth in oil-drilling activity around 2010 and a bust thereafter. We find that residents who move after the bust experience stronger consumer financial health than residents who stay put.

The authors show that court enforcement uncertainty hinders economic development using sharp variation in judiciaries across Native American reservations in the United States. Congressional legislation passed in 1953 assigned state courts the authority to resolve civil disputes on a subset of reservations, while tribal courts retained authority on unaffected reservations. Although affected and unaffected reservations had similar economic conditions when the law passed, reservations under state courts experienced significantly greater long-run growth. When the authors examine the distribution of incomes across reservations, the average difference in development is due to the lower incomes of the most impoverished reservations with tribal courts. The authors show that the relative underdevelopment of reservations with tribal courts is driven by reservations with the most uncertainty in court enforcement.