Variation in technology adoption is a key driver of differences in productivity. Previous studies sought to explain variations in technology adoption by heterogeneity in profitability, costs of adoption, or other factors. Less is known about how adoption is affected by bias in the perceived...

The recent appreciation in housing value can have large effects on aggregate saving. This paper uses a simulation model to show that aggregate saving will decline substantially if life cycle homeowners spend down their housing windfalls. Homeowners with a bequest motive, however, may save more...

Obtaining better information on the quality of health care providers is one of the most pressing issues in health policy today. In this paper we (1) develop a new method for measuring quality of care that overcomes the key limitations of available quality measures, and (2) apply this method to...

A variety of recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market. However, there is little direct empirical support for these models, even in labor markets that are textbook examples of monopsony. We use an exogenous change in wages at...

We propose a general method of moments technique to identify measurement error in self-reported and transcript-reported schooling using differences in wages, test scores, and other covariates to discern the relative verity of each measure. We also explore the implications of such reporting...

There is little causal evidence on the effect of economic and policy outcomes on voting behavior. This paper uses randomized outcomes from a school choice lottery to examine if lottery outcomes affect voting behavior in a school board election. We show that losing the lottery has no significant...

The issue of whether higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income is an important factor in the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policy. Despite an outpouring of research on this topic in the 1950s and 1960s, the question remains unresolved and has since received...

The Medicare program transfers more than $200 billion annually from taxpayers to beneficiaries. This paper considers the incidence of such transfers. First, we examine the net tax payments and program expenditures for individuals in different lifetime income groups. We find Medicare has led to...

Tax reforms are sometimes touted to have strong macroeconomic growth effects. We consider the impact of a major tax reform on the long-term growth rates of the U.S. economy using three approaches. The first approach is to examine the historical record of the U.S. economy to evaluate whether tax...

Microdata studies of household saving often find a significant group in the population with virtually no wealth, raising concerns about heterogeneity in motives for saving. In particular, this heterogeneity has been interpreted as evidence against the life-cycle model of saving. This paper...