Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) "Sinews of Power," attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of domestic, rather than traded, goods: excise revenues, coarsely associated with...

Regime changes toward autocracy typically reshape the judicial framework, effectively eroding the separation of powers and leading the nation toward an autocratic path. Recent instances of regime shift in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey offer templates of democratic erosion through manipulation and...

This paper reviews recent developments in macro and finance on the relationship between financial risk and the real economy. We focus on three specific topics: the term structure of uncertainty, time variation - and specifically the long-term decline - in the variance risk premium, and time...

The evolution of the IMS and IFS in the past several hundred years can be viewed through the lens of the Copernican heliocentric system developed over 500 years ago. We trace out the evolution across regimes of the IMS and IFS in terms of network representations of the Copernican system. We...

This paper studies how a large increase in the price level is transmitted to the real economy through firm balance sheets. Using newly digitized macro- and micro-level data from the German inflation of 1919-1923, we show that inflation led to a large reduction in real debt burdens and...

From Elihu Thomson and Herbert Dow in the late nineteenth century to Steve Jobs a hundred years later, many entrepreneurs have been stymied by their investors. In this paper, we use a simple model to explore how outcomes might have been different if entrepreneurs, instead of the investors, had...

Recent models and empirical work on network formation emphasize the importance of propinquity in producing strong interpersonal connections. Yet, one might wonder how deep such insights run, as thus far empirical results rely on survey and lab-based evidence. In this study, we examine...

We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...

Over the past decade, an increasing number of firms have delegated pricing decisions to algorithms in consumer markets such as travel, entertainment, and retail; business markets such as digital advertising; and platform markets such as ride-sharing. This trend, driven primarily by the increased...