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...

Machine Learning models are often considered to be "black boxes" that provide only little room for the incorporation of theory (cf. e.g. Mukherjee, 2017; Veltri, 2017). This article proposes so-called Dynamic Factor Trees (DFT) and Dynamic Factor Forests (DFF) for macroeconomic forecasting, which...

This paper provides evidence that the combination of land-use restrictions and an increasing demand for housing can create incentives to induce forest fires as a means to circumvent regulation and increase the supply of land available for residential construction. I estimate the effect of the...

Governments are present-biased toward spending. Fiscal rules are deficit limits that trade off commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks. We compare coordinated rules --- chosen jointly by a group of countries --- to uncoordinated rules. If governments' present bias is...

We argue that when fiscal policy is endogenously determined, the incentives of redistributive politics associated with its formulation can endogenously add to the uncertainty and volatility that an economy faces. In particular, small shocks may get translated into large fluctuations. Our...

We use data on credit in Turkey to document a strong political lending cycle. State-owned banks systematically adjust their lending around local elections compared with private banks in the same province. There is considerable tactical redistribution: state-owned banks increase credit in...

We use data on the universe of credit in Turkey to document a strong political lending cycle. State-owned banks systematically adjust their lending around local elections compared with private banks in the same province. There is considerable tactical redistribution: state-owned banks increase...