This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution...

We develop a dynamic model of transitions in and out of employment. A worker finds a job at an optimal stopping time, when a Brownian motion with drift hits a barrier. This implies that the duration of each worker's jobless spells has an inverse Gaussian distribution. We allow for arbitrary...

Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for over 17 percent of GDP in 2012. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the...

Given the challenges in quantifying the role of human capital on economic development, measuring human capital itself becomes an important issue. It is desirable to have a comprehensive human capital measure that goes beyond the traditional measures based on education attainment, yet is...

How do regional productivity shocks or transportation infrastructure improvements affect aggregate welfare? In a general class of spatial equilibrium models, we provide a formula for aggregate welfare changes, decomposed into terms associated with (i) technology (Fogel 1964, Hulten 1978), (ii)...

We study racial disparities in police use of force. A pervasive issue in studies of policing is that the available data are selected by the police. As a result, disparities computed in the observed sample may be biased if selection into the data differs by race. We develop a framework and...

Macroeconomists increasingly use external sources of exogenous variation for causal inference. However, unless such external instruments (proxies) capture the underlying shock without measurement error, existing methods are silent on the importance of that shock for macroeconomic fluctuations....

A recent "revisionist " literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an "episodic " event of the first-half of the 1980s driven by non-market factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since...

We examine technology adoption and consumer welfare disparities across demographic groups using data from an online solar photovoltaic (PV) marketplace. Low-income households are 25% less likely to purchase solar through the platform and obtain 53% lower expected consumer surplus than...