We study the impact of marital property legislation passed in the US South in the 1840s on households’ investment in risky, entrepreneurial projects. These laws protected the assets of newly married women from creditors in a world of virtually unlimited liability. We compare couples married after the passage of a marital property law with couples from the same state who were married before. Consistent with a simple model of household borrowing that trades off agency costs against risk sharing, the effect on investment was heterogeneous. It increased if most household property came from the husband and decreased if most came from the wife.

We study a program that funded 39,000 Jewish households in New York City to leave enclave neighborhoods circa 1910. Compared to their neighbors with the same occupation and income score at baseline, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after removal, and these gains persisted to the next generation. Men who left enclaves also married spouses with less Jewish names, but they did not choose less Jewish names for their children. Gains were largest for men who spent more years outside of an enclave. Our results suggest that leaving ethnic neighborhoods could facilitate economic advancement and assimilation into the broader society, but might make it more difficult to retain cultural identity.

We demonstrate the importance of intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (iMPCs) in disciplining general equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents and nominal rigidities. In a benchmark case, the dynamic response of output to a change in the path of government spending or taxes is given by an equation involving iMPCs, which we call the intertemporal Keynesian cross. Fiscal multipliers depend only on the interaction between iMPCs and public deficits. We provide empirical estimates of iMPCs and argue that they are inconsistent with representative- agent, two-agent and one-asset heterogeneous-agent models, but can be matched by models with two assets. Quantitatively, models that match empirical iMPCs predict deficit-financed fiscal multipliers that are larger than one, even if monetary policy is active, taxation is distortionary, and investment is crowded out. These models also imply larger amplification of shocks that involve private borrowing, as we illustrate in an application to deleveraging.

With every passing election, it seems clearer and clearer that the Western world's rich democracies are going through a fundamental political realignment. Out goes the old left/right political divide that we grew up with; in comes a new open/closed division. The fit is far from perfect, but generally speaking, the new order pits centrists against extremists of all stripes, the highly educated against those with less education, and those who consider themselves citizens of the world against those who identify with smaller worlds. Its central debates concern the mobility of capital, goods and ideas, but above all the mobility of people. Even the arguments over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership pale in comparison with those over migration. The last week alone has seen uproar in the United States over Texas Senate Bill 4 (considered to be anti-immigrant in nature) and in Europe over the British government's initial proposals on the fate of citizens of other European Union countries who have migrated to Britain.

Relying on diversity measures computed at the apartment block level under conditions of exogenous allocation of public housing in France, this paper identifies the effects of ethnic diversity on social relationships and housing quality. Housing Survey data reveal that diversity induces social anomie. Through the channel of anomie, diversity accounts for the inability of residents to sanction others for vandalism and to act collectively to demand proper building maintenance. However, anomie also lowers opportunities for violent confrontations, which are not related to diversity.