Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. These differences exist among virtually all subpopulations, are relatively constant over time, and are economically large. Although racial differences in utility preference parameters might account for a portion of these consumption differences, we emphasize instead a model of status seeking in which conspicuous consumption is used as a costly indicator of a household's economic position. Using merged data on race- and state-level income, we demonstrate that a key prediction of the status-signaling model—that visible consumption should be declining in reference group income—is strongly borne out in the data for each racial group. Moreover, we show that accounting for differences in reference group income characteristics explains most of the racial difference in visible consumption.

We investigate how demand conditions affect employers’ provision of safety—something about which theory is ambivalent. Positive demand shocks relax financial constraints that limit safety investment but simultaneously raise the opportunity cost of increasing safety rather than production. We study the US metals mining sector, leveraging exogenous demand shocks from short-term variation in global commodity prices. We find that positive price shocks substantially increase workplace injury rates and safety regulation noncompliance. While these results indicate the general dominance of the opportunity cost effect, shocks that only increase mines’ cash flow lower injury rates, illustrating that financial constraints also affect safety.

In 1966, Southern hospitals were barred from participating in Medicare unless they discontinued their longstanding practice of racial segregation. Using data from five Deep South states and exploiting county-level variation in Medicare certification dates, we find that gaining access to an ostensibly integrated hospital had no effect on Black postneonatal mortality. Similarly, there is little evidence that the campaign contributed to the trend towards in-hospital births among Southern Black mothers. These results are consistent with descriptions of the hospital desegregation campaign as producing only cosmetic changes and illustrate the limits of anti-discrimination policies imposed upon reluctant actors.

We study how the recent housing boom and bust affected college enrollment during the 2000s. We exploit cross-city variation in local housing booms, which improved labor market opportunities for young men and women. We find that the boom lowered college enrollment, with effects concentrated at two-year colleges. The decline in enrollment during the boom was generally reversed during the bust; however, attainment remains persistently low for particular cohorts, suggesting that reduced educational attainment is an enduring effect of the recent housing cycle. The housing boom can account for approximately 25 percent of the recent slowdown in college attainment.

Using data recently collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that the intergenerational correlation in expenditures is no larger than that in income, suggesting limited intra-family risk-sharing. On the other hand, even after controlling for the intergenerational correlation in income, the expenditures correlation remains significant. This suggests that other factors such as preferences, access to credit, and non-pecuniary inter vivos transfers potentially played a role in consumption smoothing across generations within a family. We also find that the correlation coefficients estimated using food and imputed total expenditures are smaller than that estimated using the measured total expenditures.

We propose a methodology exploiting time diary data and “leisure Engel curves” to infer quality changes across leisure activities and measure the effects on the marginal return to leisure. We study leisure returns for men aged 21–30, who have shifted leisure toward video gaming and recreational computing and have had larger market work hour declines than older men or women since 2004. We show that recreational computing is distinctly a leisure luxury for younger men. By increasing the value of time, innovations to this leisure technology have lowered young men's work hours by 2%, or much of their work hours decline compared to older men's.

Exploiting variation across states and municipalities in the timing and details of midwifery laws introduced during the period 1900–1940 and using data assembled from various primary sources, we find that requiring midwives to be licensed reduced maternal mortality by 7%–8% and may have led to modest reductions in infant mortality. These estimates represent the strongest evidence to date that licensing restrictions can improve the health of consumers and are directly relevant to ongoing policy debates on the merits of licensing midwives.