Based on well-known evidence on labor supply elasticities, several authors have concluded that women should be taxed at lower rates than men. We evaluate the quantitative implications of taxing women at a lower rate than men. Relative to the current system of taxation, setting a proportional tax...

This study designs a natural field experiment linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine the effectiveness of matching gifts and challenge gifts, two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities. We find evidence that challenge gifts...

Much is known about private returns to education in the form of higher earnings. Less is known about social value, over and above the private, market value. Associations between education and socially-desirable outcomes are strong, but disentangling the effect of education from other causal...

We analyze the welfare cost of inflation in a model with cash-in-advance constraints and an endogenous distribution of establishments' productivities. Inflation distorts aggregate productivity through firm entry dynamics. The model is calibrated to the United States economy and the long-run...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

Empirical analyses of the effects of public and private pensions on household saving impose strong assumptions in order to obtain a tractable empirical model: fixed retirement and pension claiming ages, no borrowing constraint, little or no uncertainty, and no institutional restrictions on...

This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and singlemarket- induced migration from new to present...

We study the effects of FDI and increasing multinational activity utilizing a macroeconomic two-sector model of the small open economy with flexible exchange rates and perfect capital mobility. The focus is on horizontal greenfield investment and its impact on production, exchange rates, trade,...

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main...

Population ageing and decline are inescapable facts for Germany which are expected to have - especially due to the labour force decrease - negative impacts on the economy. In this context it is often referred to the possibility of countering potentially negative economic effects of population...