Key parameters for the modeling of public finances are tax revenue elasticities with respect to tax bases. Yet the existing studies estimating these elasticities for emerging countries disregard the effects of tax reforms on tax revenue, which renders their estimates inconsistent. We use a...

National borders reduce trade, but most estimates of the border effect seem puzzlingly large. We show that major methodological innovations of the last decade combine to shrink the border effect to a one-third reduction in international trade flows worldwide. The border effect varies across...

We show that the large elasticity of substitution between capital and labor estimated in the literature on average, 0.9, can be explained by three factors: publication bias, use of aggregated data, and omission of the first-order condition for capital. The mean elasticity conditional on the...

We present the first meta-analysis of the income elasticity of water demand that accounts for the effects of publication selection (the preferential reporting of estimates that are intuitive and statistically significant). Paradoxically, more affected by publication selection are the otherwise...

We show that the large elasticity of substitution between capital and labor estimated in the literature on average, 0.9, can be explained by three factors: publication bias, use of aggregated data, and omission of the first-order condition for capital. The mean elasticity conditional on the...