Motivated by the public debate regarding corporate responsibility, we construct a memory-based model of decision-making to illustrate how corporate and political communication can impact policy preferences. We test the predictions of our model in a new large-scale survey of U.S. citizens on...

Combining a variety of survey and administrative data, this paper measures the progressivity of taxes and transfers at the U.S. federal level and separately for each state. The findings are as follows. (i) The federal tax and transfer system is progressive. (ii) State and local tax and transfer...

Beginning in the 1970's, many state courts declared the widespread inequality in education spending across schools to violate their state's constitution. Funding systems then emerged providing differing approaches to state and local support of education. We develop a theoretical framework and...

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...

Subsidies and in-kind transfers give rise to negative fiscal externalities. However, internalizing negative fiscal externalities through taxation would undo the subsidy or in-kind transfer that caused them. Similarly, positive fiscal externalities cannot be internalized though government...

This paper overviews theoretical and empirical studies of political borders from an economic perspective. It reviews theories of the number and size of nations focused on the trade-off between economies of scale in public-good provision and heterogeneity of preferences over public policies as...

While police brutality has sparked demands to scale back policing, public constituencies still have limited knowledge about policing alternatives. In survey experiments, we provide information about dontcallthepolice.com--a database of police alternatives--and police violence statistics and...

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...

A central mission of public economics has been to determine policies that optimize utilitarian welfare. To improve the realism of policy evaluation, it is desirable to enrich understanding of behavior and develop methods of analysis that use the enriched understanding to assess policies....

We usually consider it progress when a country begins to shift from an autocratic to a democratic form of government. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating political instability. It also increases the...