In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) measurement of inequality. We estimate this parameter using four large...

Understanding and quantifying the determinants of the number of sectors or firms exporting in a given country is of relevance for the assessment of trade policies. Estimation of models for the number of exporting sectors, however, poses a challenge because the dependent variable has both a lower...

Relative wages vary considerably across regions of the United Kingdom, with skill-abundant regions exhibiting lower skill premia than skill-scarce regions. This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages. U.K. regions with low skill...

This paper proposes a new empirical framework for analyzing specialization dynamics. A country’s pattern of specialization is viewed as a distribution across sectors, and statistical techniques for analyzing the evolution of this entire distribution are employed. The empirical framework is...

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region- industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across...

In order to value non-market goods, economists estimate individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for these goods using revealed or stated preference methods. We compare these conventional approaches with subjective well-being (SWB), which is based on individuals’ ratings of their happiness or...

Subjective wellbeing data is becoming increasingly popular in economics research. The wellbeing valuation approach uses wellbeing data instead of data gleaned from preferences to attach monetary values to non-market goods. This method could be an important alternative to preference-based...

Conventional cost-benefit analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal in the sense that it will not significantly change relative prices. In particular, it is assumed that the policy or project does not change the underlying...

This paper investigates how corrupt public officials and private agents adjust to policy reforms that change opportunities for bribery deals to take place. I exploit an exogenously determined tariff liberalization program that altered opportunities to extract bribes through a particular method...

Developing countries are vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, yet there is disagreement about what they should do to protect themselves from antic- ipated damages. In particular, it is unclear what the optimal balance is between investments in traditional productive capital...