I’m currently a PhD student in Economics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Previously, I was a Pre-doctoral research assistant at the Fisher Center for Real Estate + Urban Economics, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
My academic interests include spatial/environmental economics, industrial organization, and public finance.
I graduated with double majors in Economics and Mathematics from Middlebury College, VT in 2022.
You can reach me at nguyen24@wharton.upenn.edu.
Working Papers
Last updated: November 2024
[ Abstract ]
I measure the retail responses of households to a housing wealth shock during the housing bust of the 2000s and 2010s. To identify the housing wealth effect, I use an instrumental variable (IV) approach to isolate variation in home value arising from differential topological features across U.S metropolitan areas. I find a large spending response during the housing collapse between 2008 and 2012. Combining the IV approach with local projections to measure the impulse response of retail spending shows that the housing wealth effect is dynamic, and fairly persistent 10 to 15 quarters after a shock. Using rich spatial retail data, I then investigate the mechanisms of this retail spending response. First, the spending elasticity out of housing wealth is higher for low-income and low-wealth households. Conditional on income and home value, locales with a higher mortgage burden also exhibit higher responsiveness. This debt-induced wedge in the housing wealth effect is persistent over time. On the credit supply side, controlling for local bank failures dampens the response of consumption expenditure to the housing wealth shock by 10-20 percent, implying that the disruption to the local bank system hinders borrowing and consumption smoothing. Second, variation in retail prices accounts for approximately 25 percent of the variation in the response of retail spending. A negative housing wealth shock results in fewer transactions (extensive margin) and fewer units of goods purchased per transaction (intensive margin), reflecting a drop in real consumption as the main driver of reduced spending. In addition to cutting the volume of consumption, constrained households adopt shopping strategies that drive down both aggregate nominal spending and the quality of consumption. For the same product item, consumers switch to relatively less expensive stores given a decline in housing wealth. In addition, within a product category, a negative housing wealth shock encourages consumers to purchase less expensive, and potentially lower quality, items. Estimates imply that store-switching is substantially more prevalent than product-switching.Works in Progress
"Pay-as-you-go Pensions in Spatial Equilibrium"