README

This file provides data and program documentation for "High-Cost Credit and Consumption Smoothing" by Christine Dobridge, Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Program descriptions: All programs are Stata do-files and are in the folder Dobridge_Payday_Programs_11_27_17.zip
1. Program Payday_NatDis_Controls.do creates the dummy variable for whether there was an extreme weather event a given county in a given month, which is used in the regressions
2. Program Payday_Access_datagenerate.do creates the PaydayAccess variable, which is used in the regressions
3. Program CleanPopData.do creates the stata file for the county population data
4. Program CEInterview_Payday_DataGenerateMonthly generates the monthly expenditures file (from the CE MTAB files) to be used in the regressions
5. Program CEInterview_Payday_DataGenerateQuarterly generates the variables needed from the quarterly CE interview files (from the CE FMLI files) to be used in the regressions
6. Program Payday_CEX_Interview_Regressions contains the code for the summary statistics and regressions reported in the paper

Data file descriptions:
All data files referenced in the do-files are included in the folder Dobridge_Payday_ASCII_Files_11_24_17.zip, except for GeocodeNewid.dta. All
data files in the do-file are Stata .dta versions of the ASCII csv text files, which can be imported into Stata. 
The data file GeocodeNewid.dta is the confidential dataset that contains county and census tract identifiers for households in the CE. 


