We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects...

The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces re-distribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of first-order stochastic dominance,...

The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of first-order stochastic dominance,...

Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a...

The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of first-order stochastic dominance,...

This paper provides general and empirically implementable sufficient statistics formulas for optimal nonlinear tax systems in the presence of across-income heterogeneity in preferences, inheritances, income-shifting capabilities, and other sources. We study unrestricted tax systems on income and...

Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a...