The growing use of on-line educational content and related video services has changed the way people access education, share knowledge, and possibly make life decisions. In this paper, we characterize how video content affects individual decision-making and willingness to share in the context of...

Internet-based educational resources are proliferating rapidly. One concern associated with these (potentially transformative) technological changes is that they will be disequalizing - as many technologies of the last several decades have been - creating superstar teachers and a winner-take-all...

This study investigates how being exposed to a field of study influences students’ major choices. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university where all first-year students face largely the same curriculum before they choose a major. An important component of the first-year curriculum...

Because of differences in accrued gains and investors' tax-sensitivity, capital gains "lock-in" varies across mutual funds even for the same stock at the same time. Using this variation, we show that tax lock-in affects funds' governance decisions. Higher tax lock-in decreases the likelihood a...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

Thomas Piketty's monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century has transported us to a higher understanding of historical movements in inequality. This essay ranks the promise of different paths that scholars can usefully follow from the point to which his book has guided us. The main path to...

A principal reason that losses from catastrophic risks have been increasing over time is that more individuals and firms are locating in harm's way while not taking appropriate protective measures. Several behavioural biases lead decision-makers not to invest in adaptation measures until after...

The spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey’s provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 are reconstituted using forensic accounting techniques from primary sources. Such has not been done previously for any British North American colony. These data are used...

We contribute to the literature on tax multipliers by analyzing the pitfalls in identification and measurement of tax shocks. Our main focus is on disentangling the discussion regarding the identification of exogenous tax policy shocks (i.e., changes in tax policy that are not the result of...

In a previous paper I described how the tax design called the X Tax would facilitate an international tax system free of many of the complexities and avoidance opportunities plaguing the existing international tax regime and also have neutrality properties generally deemed desirable. A choice...