The White House has brought on Office of Management and Budget official Celeste Drake as the new deputy director of the National Economic Council for labor and economy.
this post authored by Ruchi Avtar, Rajashri Chakrabarti, Maxim Pinkovskiy, and Giorgio Topa
This post is the first in a two-part series that seeks to understand whether consumer spending patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic evolved differentially across counties by race and income. As the pandemic hit and social distancing restrictions were put into place in March 2020, consumer spending plummeted. Subsequently, as social distancing restrictions began to be relaxed later in spring 2020, consumer spending started to rebound.
We find that higher-income counties had a considerably steeper decline and a shallower recovery than low-income counties did. The differences by race were also sizeable as the pandemic struck but became considerably more muted after summer of 2020. The decline and the recovery until the end of summer were sharper for majority-minority (MM) than majority nonminority (MNM) counties, while both sets of counties showed similar growth in spending after that. The s
April 27, 2021
U.S. consumers hold trillions of dollars in debt, but they hold it very unevenly. “If you work with credit data and outcomes in the U.S., you see this tremendous variation both across states and within states,” says Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, an assistant professor of finance at Yale SOM. “There are a lot of reasons for that, but one interesting thing is how variation in health insurance looks similar to variation in debt.”
The question is: are the geographic differences in health insurance coverage and the geographic differences in debt related? And if they are, does that mean that greater access to health insurance can help ease consumer debt? Goldsmith-Pinkham examines the connection between health insurance and debt in a recent working paper, co-authored with Maxim Pinkovskiy of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Jacob Wallace of the Yale School of Public Health.