We discuss properties and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive three main results. First, assuming constant treatment effects before and/or after some event time, also known as binning, is a natural restriction imposed on theoretically infinite effect windows. Binning identifies...

Public financial management (PFM) has a significant role in linking resources to results by financing human development outcomes. When economic stimulus packages are short run in nature, thematic PFM, such as child budgeting, has a crucial role in reducing crime against children. Using fixed...

Rising federal debt threatens to reduce the growth of the economy, people’s living standards, wages, and the standard of living. A policy solution needs to respect many constraints, most importantly, that it is seen as fair — both within generations and across generations. This article...

A recent Gallup poll found only 13% of Americans trust the media “a great deal,” while 28% indicated that they trust the media “a fair amount.”However, evidence suggests a more favorable situation for local journalism.Poynter’s 2018 Media Trust Survey and a recent Knight...

Voluntary and government-mandated lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have caused causing drastic reductions in economic activity around the world. We present a parsimonious two-country-SIR model with some degree of substitutability between home and foreign goods, and show that trading partners'...

Using high-frequency proxies for economic activity over a large sample of countries, we show that the economic crisis during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic was only partly due to government lockdowns. Economic activity also contracted because of voluntary social distancing in...

The peer review process typically has multiple evaluators. Too often editors rely on the Union Heuristic, which requires authors to perform all requested tests and extensions suggested by referees and editors, with results confirming the paper’s message. The Union Heuristic is easy, but has...

In recent years, the concept of price of anarchy has emerged as a tool to measure the efficiency of Nash equilibria in noncooperative games. In this paper we apply an adaptation of this concept to subgame-perfect Nash equilibria arising in three different dynamic noncooperative game-theoretic...

This paper uses data from the largest tax preparer in the United States to estimate the impact of the "saver's credit," aUSfederal program providing financial incentives to encourage retirement savings, on the decision to contribute to an IRA. It finds significant, but very modest, effects. This...

We develop a model that accounts for the decay of the average contribution observed in experiments on voluntary contributions to a public good. The novel idea is that people's moral motivation is "weak." Their judgment about the right contribution depends on observed contributions by group...