Overview
Tal Gross is an economist at Boston University (Questrom School of Business) and NBER affiliate. His research focuses on health economics, public finance, and consumer financial outcomes, with particular attention to how social insurance programs interact with household financial stability. He is co-author, with Manasi Deshpande and Yalun Su, of the 2021 AEJ: Applied Economics paper linking the universe of SSA disability applicants to nationwide records on bankruptcy, foreclosure, eviction, and home transactions.
Key Contributions
- Co-developed the administrative data linkage between SSA 831 Disability File and public records on bankruptcy (Gross et al. 2016), CoreLogic foreclosure, and AIRS eviction — the empirical infrastructure later used by Deshpande and Lockwood (2022) for the EAWTP welfare decomposition
- Co-documented the "Ashenfelter's peak" pattern in financial distress for disability applicants: rates of bankruptcy, foreclosure, and eviction peak at the time of application
- Co-estimated the first quasi-experimental causal effects of DI allowance on financial distress: −31% bankruptcy, −34% foreclosure, −15% net home sale within 3 years (vocational grid RD)
- Prior work (Gross et al. 2016): established the near-census bankruptcy record dataset used as the primary bankruptcy data source
- Co-author of Deshpande, Gross, and Wang (2017): first causal estimates of government cash assistance effects on household bankruptcy; SSI removal reduces parent bankruptcy probability by 12 pp (80% decline), with the credit access channel as the proposed mechanism; extends the Gross, Notowidigdo, and Wang bankruptcy dataset to the SSI children population
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