In public sector procurement, social welfare often depends on the time taken to complete the contract. A leading example is highway construction, where slow completion times inflict a negative externality on commuters. Recently, highway departments have introduced innovative contracting methods...

We quantify the commute time savings associated with work from home, drawing on data for 27 countries. The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. We estimate that work from home saved about two hours per week per worker in 2021 and 2022, and that it will...

Gender-Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's rule of optimality because it taxes at a lower rate the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous. We study GBT in a model in which labor supply elasticities emerge...

Graduated income tax rates and transfer programs create piecewise-linear budget constraints that consist of budget segments and kink points. With any change in these tax rules, each individual may switch between a kink point and a budget segment, between two budget segments, or between two kink...

Theories of crime in economics focus on the roles of deterrence and incapacitation in reducing criminal activity. In addition to deterrence, a growing body of empirical evidence has shown that both income support and employment subsidies can play a role in crime reduction. This paper extends the...

We develop novel estimates of peak and off-peak price elasticities for urban mass transit demand in San Francisco using a large natural experiment with 3.6 million trip sessions and a natural field experiment that both have exogenous price subsidies. We then estimate the welfare impacts for...

We examine firm responses to location-based hiring subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines...

The normative principle of benefit-based taxation has exerted substantial influence on many areas of public finance, but it has been largely set aside in the modern theoretical approach to optimal income taxation, where welfarist objectives dominate. A prerequisite for that gap to close is the...