Firing Costs, Misallocation, and Aggregate Productivity -- by Jose-Maria...
We assess the quantitative impact of firing costs on aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) in a dynamic general-equilibrium framework where the distribution of establishment-level productivity is...
View ArticleRecent Trends in U.S. Top Income Shares in Tax Record Data Using More...
Access to IRS personal income tax records improves researchers' ability to track U.S. income and inequality, especially at the very top of the distribution (Piketty and Saez 2003). However, rather than...
View ArticleTo Work for Yourself, for Others, or Not At All? How Disability Benefits...
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program provides disability benefits to nearly one in five military veterans in the US and its annual expenditures exceed $60...
View ArticleLabor Drops: Experimental Evidence on the Return to Additional Labor in...
The majority of enterprises in developing countries have no paid workers. Is this optimal, or the result of frictions in labor markets? We conduct an experiment providing wage subsidies to randomly...
View ArticleCurrency Wars or Efficient Spillovers? A General Theory of International...
In an interconnected world, national economic policies regularly lead to large international spillover effects, which frequently trigger calls for international policy cooperation. However, the premise...
View ArticleThe Effect of Education on Overall Fertility -- by Philip DeCicca, Harry...
Fertility rates have long been falling in many developed countries while educational attainment in these countries has risen. We attempt to reconcile these two trends with a novel application of a...
View ArticleThe Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level...
We estimate the causal effect of each county in the U.S. on children's earnings and other outcomes in adulthood using a fixed effects model that is identified by analyzing families who move across...
View ArticleThe Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood...
We show that the neighborhoods in which children grow up play a significant role in determining their earnings, college attendance rates, and fertility and marriage rates by studying more than 7...
View ArticleSupply-Side Drug Policy in the Presence of Substitutes: Evidence from the...
Overdose deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, making this the worst drug overdose epidemic in U.S. history. In response, numerous supply-side...
View ArticleArrested Development: Theory and Evidence of Supply-Side Speculation in the...
This paper studies the role of disagreement in amplifying housing cycles. Speculation is easier in the land market than in the housing market due to frictions that make renting less efficient than...
View ArticleThe Costs of and Net Returns to College Major -- by Joseph G. Altonji, Seth...
This paper uses administrative student and expenditure data from Florida public universities to describe a) how the cost of producing graduates varies by major, b) how the inclusion of major-specific...
View ArticleNon-Cognitive Abilities and Financial Delinquency: The Role of Self-Efficacy...
We investigate a novel determinant of household financial delinquency, namely, people's subjective expectations regarding the cost-benefit trade-off in default decisions. These expectations are...
View ArticleIntergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution -- by Alberto...
Using newly collected cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in five countries: France, Italy,...
View ArticlePrison Work Programs in a Model of Deterrence -- by A. Mitchell Polinsky
This article considers the social desirability of prison work programs in a model in which the function of imprisonment is to deter crime. Two types of prison work programs are studied--voluntary ones...
View ArticleFaculty Deployment in Research Universities -- by Paul N. Courant, Sarah Turner
Deploying faculty efficiently (or more efficiently) should surely part of any optimizing strategy on the part of a college or university. Basic microeconomics about the "theory of the firm" provide...
View ArticleGasoline Price Uncertainty and the Design of Fuel Economy Standards -- by...
What are the implications of gasoline price volatility for the design of fuel economy policies? I show that this problem has a strong parallel to Weitzman's (1974) classic model of using price or...
View ArticleMaximizing the Impact of Climate Finance: Funding Projects or Pilot Projects?...
This paper contributes to the understanding of how to maximize the impact of publicly provided climate finance to leverage the private sector. Agencies seeking to promote private investment in support...
View ArticleExpectation, Disappointment, and Exit: Reference Point Formation in a...
We study expectation-based reference point formation using data from an online auction marketplace. We hypothesize that exit from the marketplace is affected by disappointment from abruptly losing an...
View ArticleThe Changing Structure of Africa's Economies -- by Xinshen Diao, Kenneth...
Using data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center's Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys, we show that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction has been...
View ArticleCool to be Smart or Smart to be Cool? Understanding Peer Pressure in...
Concerns about social image may negatively affect schooling behavior. We identify two potentially important peer cultures: one that stigmatizes effort (thus, where it is "smart to be cool") and one...
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