This paper reviews a variety of estimates of the demand and supply elasticities of educated labor. It finds that elasticities of substitution between more and less educated labor range fran 1.0 to 2.0 and that elasticities of the supply of students to colleges are also on the order of 1.0 to 2.0...

A common objection to "sin taxes"--corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and sugary drinks--is that they often fall disproportionately on low-income consumers. This paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive motives...

From its inception, demand estimation has faced the problem of "many prices." This paper provides estimators of average demand and associated bounds on exact consumer surplus when there are many prices in cross-section or panel data. For cross-section data we provide a debiased machine learner...

The ratio estimator of a firm's markup is the ratio of the output elasticity of a variable input to that input's cost share in revenue. This note raises issues that concern identification and estimation of markups using the ratio estimator. Concerning identification: (i) if the revenue...

We propose a novel approach to estimate the trade elasticity at various horizons. When large countries change Most Favored Nation (MFN) tariffs, small trading partners that are not in a preferential trade agreement experience plausibly exogenous tariff changes. The differential growth rates of...

How can price elasticities be identified when agents face optimization frictions such as adjustment costs or inattention? I derive bounds on structural price elasticities that are a function of the observed effect of a price change on demand, the size of the price change, and the degree of...

I discuss economic approaches to the demand for harmfully addictive substances and estimate time-series demand functions for the period from 1975 through 2003. My estimates suggest that changes in price can explain a good deal of the observed changes in cigarette smoking, binge alcohol drinking,...

Can variants of the classic Calvo (1983) model of sticky prices account for the statistical behavior of post-war US inflation? We develop and test versions of the model for which the answer to this question is yes. We then investigate whether these models imply plausible degrees of inertia in...

This paper provides an empirical estimate of price' and risk' elasticities of demand for term life insurance for those who purchase some insurance. It finds that the elasticity with respect to changes in premiums is generally higher than the elasticity with respect to changes in risk. It also...