This paper builts on earlier evidence showing that, while most countries exhibit little evidence of unconditional income convergence, countries that trade heavily with another tend to exhibit a muchhigher incidence of convergence.

A panel study reveals that an increase in pretax income equality leads to sudstantially lower retail prices. Prices also fall if the income tax on high income families is raised. One explanation is that equality makes consumer demand more elastic. This would imply that progressive taxation helps...

We quantity an amount of cross-sectional income and consumption smoothing achieved within subgroups of states, such as regions or clubs, e.g. the club of rich states.

There is a broad range of phenomena that are categorized as "mental accounting". Some of these phenomena may be viewed as situations in which a person evaluates decisions based on the implicit assumption that the decision she makes at a given moment will be repeated many times in the future. For...

What are the cyclical properties of U.S. state and local government fiscal policy? The budget surplus of local and, in particular, state governments is procyclical, smoothing disposable income and consumption of state residents. This happens over both short- and medium-term horizons. Procyclical...

We remove the aggregate US-wide component in US state level disposable income and consumption and find that state-specific consumption exhibits substantially less excess sensitivity to lagged state-specific disposable income than if the aggregate component is not controlled for. This is evidence...

We investigate channels of federally provided income insurance for U.S. States, finding that a major part of federal insurance is provided through transfers. We compare the "bang for the buck" of various fiscal institutions, finding that unemployment benefits are dramatically more efficient in...