We exploit a panel of city-level data with rich demographic information to estimate the distributional effects of Department of Defense spending and its effects on a range of social outcomes. The income generated by defense spending accrues predominantly to households without a bachelor's...

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...

We construct a database of public pension policy changes with motivation and implementation information for ten OECD countries. Structural pension reforms, motivated by long-run sustainability concerns, often come with prolonged phase-in periods. In response to pension retrenchments implemented...

While "'Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes" (Bullock, 1716), the structure of taxes and their burden has undergone large and frequent changes over time. We provide a brief history of the U.S. federal income tax reforms since the 1960s, we calculate effective federal...

Fiscal policy in the U.S. and other countries renders intertemporal budgets non-differentiable, nonconvex, and discontinuous. Consequently, assessing work and saving responses to policy requires global optimization. This paper develops the Global Life-Cycle Optimizer (GLO), a stochastic...

In 2020, local governments in China began issuing digital coupons to stimulate spending in targeted categories such as restaurants and supermarkets. Using data from a large e-commerce platform and a bunching estimation approach, we find that the coupons caused large increases in spending of...

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...

We incorporate a general model of frictions into the bunching-based elasticity estimator. This model relies on fewer parameters than the conventional approach, replacing bunching window bounds with a single "lumpiness parameter," while matching rich observed bunching patterns such as...

Advanced economies borrowed substantially during the Covid recession to fund their fiscal policy. The Covid recession differed from the Great Recession in that sovereign debt markets remained calm and spreads barely responded. We study the experience of Greece, the most extreme manifestation of...

This paper explores the positive and normative consequences of government bond issuances in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, focusing on how the stock of government bonds affects the cross-sectional allocation of resources in the spirit of Samuelson (1958). We characterize the...