In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This paper evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that...

We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility...

This paper develops a method of estimating the coefficient of relative risk aversion (g) from data on labor supply. The main result is that existing estimates of labor supply elasticities place a tight bound on g, without any assumptions beyond those of expected utility theory. It is shown that...

This paper examines the welfare consequences of social safety nets in developing economies relative to developed economies. Using panel surveys of households in Indonesia and the United States, we find that food consumption falls by approximately ten percent when individuals become unemployed in...

In this paper we argue that very high marginal labor income tax rates are an effective tool for social insurance even when households have preferences with high labor supply elasticity, make dynamic savings decisions, and policies have general equilibrium effects. To make this point we construct...

We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility...

This paper shows that existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model. I derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion (g) in terms of (1) the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to the wage elasticity...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we specify, estimate and simulate a dynamic structural model of housing demand. Our model generalizes previous applied econometric work by incorporating realistic features of the housing market including non-convex adjustment costs from...

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional...