Donors often rely on local intermediaries to deliver benefits to target beneficiaries. Each selected recipient observes if the intermediary under-delivers to them, so they serve as natural monitors. However, they may withhold complaints when feeling unentitled or grateful to the intermediary for...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

This article aims to analyse the reasons for the intensive use of child labour in the 19th century and its subsequent decline in the first third of the 20th century in the context of an economy with a highly flexible labour supply like that of Catalonia. During the second half of the 19th...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...

What would be the aggregate effects of adopting a more generous and universal childcare subsidy program in the U.S.? We answer this question in a life-cycle equilibrium model with heterogeneous married and single households with three key features: (i) joint labor-supply of married households...

We take advantage of a natural experiment to provide new, credible evidence on the health consequences of scheduling births early for non-medical reasons. In May 2010, the Spanish government announced that a 2,500-euro universal “baby bonus” would stop being paid to babies born after...

This paper studies empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic fiscal policies on consumers that are allowed to di¤er depending on their individual characteristics. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate individual-level...

This paper breaks new ground toward contractual and institutional innovation in models of homeownership, equity building, and mortgage enforcement. Inspired by recent developments in the affordable housing sector and in other types of public financing schemes, this paper suggests extending...

This paper computes the optimal progressivity of the income tax code in a dynamic general equilibrium model with household heterogeneity in which uninsurable labor productivity risk gives rise to a nontrivial income and wealth distribution. A progressive tax system serves as a partial substitute...

This paper examines the role of work as an incentive device in income maintenance programs in different informational environments. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting benefit schedules with...