The impact of exposure to a major unanticipated natural disaster on the evolution of survivors' attitudes toward risk is examined, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in combination with rich population-representative longitudinal survey data...

We use four incentivized representative surveys to study the endowment effect for lotteries in 4,000 U.S. adults. We replicate the standard finding of an endowment effect--the divergence between Willingness to Accept (WTA) and Willingness to Pay (WTP), but document three new findings. First, we...

We measure individual-level loss aversion using three incentivized, representative surveys of the U.S. population (combined N=3,000). We find that around 50% of the U.S. population is loss tolerant, with many participants accepting negative-expected-value gambles. This is counter to earlier...

Do potential entrepreneurs remain in wage employment because of concerns that they will face worse job opportunities should their entrepreneurial ventures fail? Using a Canadian reform that extended job-protected leave to one year for women giving birth after a cutoff date, we study whether the...

The philanthropic sector is highly consequential, particularly in the United States, and the most important policies directed toward this sector are tax policies. Yet most economic analysis of the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is ad hoc, treating it as a subject unto itself. This...

This paper rethinks the design of the income tax by assuming that the objective of the tax is not to redistribute from rich to poor but instead to provide some insurance to individuals against the uncertainties they face in their future earnings, a motivation for the tax proposed in Buchanan...

Although it is generally blind with respect to race, the federal individual income tax can create racial disparities when factors that affect tax liability are associated with race. We provide new evidence on racial differences in marriage penalties and bonuses in the income tax, using data from...

We study behavioral responses to personal wealth taxes in Colombia. We utilize tax microdata from 1993 to 2016 linked with the leaked Panama Papers to investigate offshoring to the country's key tax havens. We leverage variation from discrete jumps in tax liability and four major reforms to the...

We estimate the extensive and intensive margin labor supply response to the monthly Child Tax Credit disbursed in 2021 as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Using Current Population Survey microdata, we compare labor supply outcomes among households who qualify for varying relative...

This paper uses account-level information, reported to the IRS by foreign financial institutions under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), to produce new evidence on the foreign financial wealth of U.S. households. We find that U.S. taxpayers hold around $4 trillion in foreign...