This paper investigates possible explanations for the increases in inequality observed in Brazil during the 1980s. While the static decompositions of inequality by household characteristics reveal that education and race of the household head, as well as geographic location, can account for a...

This paper presents the first UK estimates of the association between parental wealth during adolescence and a range of children’s outcomes in early adulthood. Parental wealth is positively associated with all outcomes examined (which include educational attainment, employment, earnings and...

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes...

We develop a simple dynamic model of decision making in the presence of moral constraints. Norm violations induce a temporal feeling of guilt that depreciates with time. Due to endogenous fluctuations of guilt, people exhibit a dynamic inconsistency in social preferences—a behavior we term...

We explore the impact of central government grants on local house prices in England using a panel data set of local authorities (LAs) from 2001 to 2008. Electoral targeting of grants to LAs by the incumbent national government provides an exogenous source of variation in grants that we exploit...

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office...

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office...

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidizethe price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a newsurvey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerablevariation in joining among...

Britain’s land use regulation (planning) system imposes very tight restrictions on the supply of office space so creating substantial rents. An unmeasured part of the costs associated with these restrictions likely comes from compliance costs, one form of which could be rent-seeking activity...

The paper examines the relative importance for industrial location of production linkages and knowledge spillovers, distinguishing between intermediate and non-intermediate goods that are backwards or forwards in nature. A novel approach is used to construct proxies for non-intermediate goods at...