Female CEOs underperform their male counterparts in terms of shareholders’ returns by roughly 0.35% per month. This difference is significant, comparable to the in-sample value premium, somewhat smaller than the equity and momentum premia, and larger than the size premium.

In the presence of distortionary taxation, the destruction of wealth–either by an act of government or an act of God–can be welfare improving, because it increases the supply of labor and therefore (holding government spending constant) allows distortionary taxes to be lowered. We show that...

We find that lottery tax windfalls finance higher state-government expenditures on supplemental security income that increase consumption, but only during bust periods. Wealth transfers from lottery winners to low income households enable fiscal policy to stabilize consumption during bust periods.

In this paper we demonstrate that supplementing the optimal non-linear income tax system with a binding maximum wage rule attains a Pareto improvement, by serving to mitigate the mimicking incentives of the high-skill individuals without entailing distortions.

In a closed economy, the infinite-horizon and the overlapping generations (OG) model prescribe diametrically opposite policies on factor taxation: the former argues that the growth-maximizing capital income tax rate should be set to zero, whereas the latter argues that it should be set as high...

This letter analyzes the impact of economic integration on capital accumulation and capital flows when countries differ in their social security systems. Funding and early retirement both foster capital accumulation relative to pay-as-you-go pensions with flexible retirement. When economies...

Using a panel of international student test scores 1980–2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending.

I show empirically that state wage-payment laws, which forbid deductions from wages and salaries without the written permission of the employee, constituted a binding constraint on firms’ choices to adopt automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans prior to 2006.

Any TU-game can be generated from a production economy with indivisible labor inputs. An equilibrium of that economy always exists after a central intervention that taxes income and subsidizes production. The set of equilibrium allocations corresponding to the smallest income tax coincides with...

The present paper argues that in the retail gasoline industry, excise taxes, by amounting to a substantial part of prices, increase the firms’ degree of market power as demand elasticity is decreased. To avoid this market power effect, a ‘flexible value tax’ on gasoline is proposed. It...