We build a publicly available platform that tracks economic activity at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report daily statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, employment rates, and other key indicators disaggregated by county, industry,...

This paper derives empirically implementable formulas for the incidence and efficiency costs of taxation that account for tax salience effects as well as other optimization errors. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the formulas imply that the economic incidence of a tax depends on its statutory...

Studies of risk in developing economies have focused on consumption fluctuations as a measure of the value of insurance. A common view in the literature is that the welfare costs of risk and benefits of social insurance are small if income shocks do not cause large consumption fluctuations. We...