Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts' choices of learning modality--whether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instruction--over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The analysis takes...

This review article, which was solicited by the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, surveys work that has been done using an empirical framework for analyzing selection in insurance markets developed by Einav, Finkelstein, and Cullen (2010). We briefly review that framework, and then describe a...

We propose a political economy mechanism that explains the presence of fiscal regimes punctuated by crisis periods. Our model focuses on the interaction between successive deficit-biased governments subject to i.i.d. fiscal shocks. We show that the economy transitions between a fiscally...

lobbying (internal organization vs. trade association) by firms in administrative agencies. It explores the power and limitations of the collective action theories and transaction cost theories in explaining lobbying. It introduces a dataset of over 900 lobbying contacts cover 101 issues at the...

Recent theoretical developments have incorporated endogenous multinational firms into the general-equilibrium model of trade. One simple taxonomy separates the theory into vertical' models in which firms geographically separate activities by stages of production and horizontal' models of...

The consumption value of a durable good diminishes as it ages due to physical deterioration and consumers' preference for the new. We develop a model of consumer specialization and trade in the market for used durables based on imperfect substitutability. Imperfect substitutability across...

Standard measures of private equity performance based on cash flows overlook discount rate risk. An index constructed from prices paid in secondary market transactions indicates that private equity discount rates vary considerably. While the standard alpha for our index is zero, measures of...

This is an invited chapter for the forthcoming Volume 4 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. We focus on markets with frictions, such as transaction costs, asymmetric information, search and matching frictions. We discuss how such frictions affect allocations, favor the emergence of...

Countries are not equally developed in large part because most countries face sets of property rights that do not foster growth despite the aggregate gains that would result from changing property rights. The difference in rents to society between the extant set of property rights and some...