Tai Viet Anh Nguyen

Tai Viet Anh Nguyen

PhD student in Economics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

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

"The Responses of Retail Spending and Real Consumption to a Housing Wealth Shock: Evidence, Dynamics, and Potential Mechanisms"
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"
(with Antoine Levy)
[ Abstract ]Many countries finance retirement through pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) pension systems that mandate contributions from workers to finance benefits for retirees. Although these schemes generally have no place-based features, their incidence and allocative effects can vary substantially across space because workers and retirees live in different places over the life-cycle. We document a strong geographic component of population aging and PAYGO redistribution in France, where mandatory PAYGO pension spending accounts for nearly 15 percent of GDP. We develop a quantitative spatial life-cycle model in which workers choose work and retirement locations and savings rates. PAYGO distorts the spatial allocation of workers and pensioners, by mandating uniform contribution rates on agents with distinct life-cycle location paths, thereby discouraging high-to-low-cost pension-age mobility. Replacing PAYGO with flexible private savings increases welfare and reallocates workers toward high-wage locations. In an aging economy, the spatial effects of PAYGO depend on whether fiscal adjustment occurs through higher contribution rates or lower replacement rates. PAYGO may still be desirable if myopia among workers is significant, generating a tradeoff between the spatial flexibility provided by private savings and the commitment value of a mandatory social security tax.