Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear income taxation in a model where such contracts arise in private labor markets that are constrained by moral hazard frictions. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlinear reforms of a given tax...

Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear income taxation in a model where such contracts arise in private labor markets that are constrained by moral hazard frictions. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlinear reforms of a given tax...

This testimony makes three main points. First, inheritances tend to exacerbate existing economic disparities and may be the most important barrier to intergenerational economic mobility. These tendencies are most pronounced at the top of the income distribution. While inherited income is...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Due to Federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. We use these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

Little is known about the impact of illicit drugs use on economic decision-making, yet the associated costs are likely large. The paper addresses this gap by studying the U.S. casino industry and conservatively estimates that a drugs-using gambler loses almost three times more money than the...

Finanzialisierung ist ein Prozess, in dessen Verlauf Finanzmärkte, -institutionen und -eliten zunehmend Einfluss auf Wirtschaftspolitik und ökonomische Ergebnisse gewinnen. Finanzialisierung transformiert die Funktionsweise des ökonomischen Systems sowohl auf der Makro- als auch auf der...

Is growth in capitalist economies wage-led or profit-led? Empirical studies have found conflicting results for different countries and periods. Possible reasons may include differences in the monetary policy/exchange rate regimes across countries and between macro behavior in the short- and...

We estimate the effect of electorally induced policy uncertainty on investment in the manufacturing sector. Because state governors exercise considerable influence over legislation and considerable discretion over regulation and permitting, and because the policies relevant to business...