The Tax Reform Act of 1969 included a provision intended to set at 50 percent the tax rate on all personal service income above the 50 percent bracket amount. The current law fails to meet this objective for the vast majority of these taxpayers. This paper explains why the current law is...

We estimate growth rates of real incomes in the U.S. by quintiles using the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) post-tax, post-transfer data as basis for the period 1979-2011. We improve upon them by including only the present value of earnings that will accrue in retirement and excluding items...

Many studies find that households increase their consumption after the receipt of expected income payments, a result inconsistent with the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis. Consumption can increase adverse health events, such as traffic accidents, heart attacks and strokes. In this paper,...

Efforts to estimate the effects of international trade on a country's real income have been hampered by the failure to account for the endogeneity of trade. Frankel and Romer recently use a country's geographic attributes - notably its distance from potential trading partners - as an instrument...

This paper investigates the role of income-driven differences in consumption patterns in explaining and projecting energy demand and CO₂ emissions. We develop and estimate a general-equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences across a large set of countries and sectors, and trace embodied...

We analyze a two-country model of trade in both legitimate and counterfeit products. Domestic firms own trademarks and establish reputations for delivering high-quality products in a steady-state equilibrium. Foreign suppliers export legitimate low-quality merchandise and counterfeits of...

We develop a simple model of international trade with heterogeneous firms that is consistent with a number of stylized features of the data. In particular, the model predicts positive as well as zero trade flows across pairs of countries, and it allows the number of exporting firms to vary...

This paper explores the international dimensions of the economics of artificial intelligence. Trade theory emphasizes the roles of scale, competition, and knowledge creation and knowledge diffusion as fundamental to comparative advantage. We explore key features of AI with respect to these...

In this paper, we present a model where trade is motivated both by preference for variety and comparative advantages. We use this framework to analyze the welfare implications of trading blocs among countries with different endowments with and without transportation costs. In this framework, we...

When trade involves differentiated products, preferential ties to a group settled abroad facilitate an exporter's entry into the foreign market by providing information and access to distribution channels. This contrasts with the difficulties experienced by an unattached producer unfamiliar with...