This paper starts with a review of the marginal tax reform methodology that was first advanced by Ahmad and Stern (1984), as well as its second-order variant introduced by Urzúa (2005). After that, it reviews some aspects of the estimation of demand systems, a topic that, although well known to...

The literature on both theoretical and empirical dynamics requires agents to solve complex dynamic programs, which assumes implicitly that agents are fully rational and have the most accurate expectations given their information set. We claim that this assumption is easily testable provided that...

This paper examines trends in household consumption and saving behaviour in each of the last three recessions in the UK. The 'Great Recession' has been different from those that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. It has been both deeper and longer, but also the composition of the cutbacks in...

In March 2010 an Interagency Technical Working Group (ITWG) released guidelines on thresholds and resources for a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The ITWG recommended that thresholds include in-kind benefits that are accounted for in resources; however, only limited in-kind benefit...

We investigate whether individuals exhibit forward looking behavior in their response to the non-linear pricing common in health insurance contracts. Our primary empirical strategy exploits the fact that employees who join an employer-provided health insurance plan later in the calendar year...

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using data from the eBay marketplace. Our Örst approach exploits the fact that seller locations are revealed only after buyers have expressed interest in an item by clicking on its listing. We use millions of location...

This paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime. We study private consumption choices focusing on former East Germany, where differential access to Western television was determined by geographic features. Using data...

This paper analyzes the curse of natural resources from a new approach, taking as reference object the economy of the Netherlands. It is shown how the deindustrialization process of an economy suffers as a result of the natural resource sector development, and how it may cause lower growth rates...

We investigate the theoretical possibility and empirical regularity of two troublesome anomalies that frequently arise when cross-price elasticities are estimated for a set of brands expected to be substitutes. These anomalies are the occurrence of: (a) negatively signed cross-elasticities; and...

Pricing schemes that vary prices in response to demand shocks may antagonize consumers and reduce demand. At the same time, consumers may take advantage of the opportunities offered by price changes. Overall, the net impact of varying price on demand is ambiguous. We investigate the issue...