Building on prior literature that constrained individuals consume the most out of a tax rebate, we study the tradeoffs high interest borrowers face when they received their 2008 tax stimulus checks. We find a persistent decline in payday borrowing in the pay cycles that follow the receipt of the tax rebate. The reduction in borrowing is a significant fraction of the mean outstanding loan (12%) and appears fairly persistent over the time, but is moderate in dollar magnitude (about $35) relative to the size of the rebate check ($600 per person). In trying to reconcile this finding with the cost of not retiring expensive payday debt, we find substantial heterogeneity across borrowers. Among individuals that we classify as temptation spenders (e.g. those that use 400 % APR loans to buy electronic goods or go on vacation), we find no reduction in payday borrowing after the tax rebate is issued, but this group represents only a small fraction of payday borrowers. A second group for which we find no debt retirement post-check is the set of borrowers that appear to use what should be short-term payday loans as a long-term financing solution. We infer that the marginal use of the tax rebate for this group was to deal with regular

People are getting fat. The rise in obesity rate has been particularly pronounced in the United States since the middle of the 1970s, but has by now extended into many other areas of the world. Several sources of technological change have been singled out as potential explanations for why people have been gaining so much weight. Increased productivity in agriculture has lowered the relative price of food (Darius Lakdwalla, Tomas Philipson, and Jayanta Bhattacharya 2005) while innovations in food processing have reduced the time cost of preparing food (David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Jesse M. Shapiro 2003). Technological change has also affected how people spend their time, in a way that may systematically have reduced calories expended. First, physically less demanding jobs in the service sector have replaced physically more demanding jobs in agriculture and manu facturing. Second, the allocation of time across different activities has changed dramatically over the last few decades: people are spending less time working (decline in labor market work for men, decline in home production work for women) and more time in mainly sedentary forms of leisure, such as watching TV (Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst 2007). While the focus so far has been on the rela tionship between how people spend their time and how many calories they expend, we argue in this piece that there might also be an inter esting relationship between how people spend their time and how many calories they consume. Motivating this question is a (at first glance) rather counterintuitive finding from the time use surveys: the fact that people, in the United States