The No Child Left Behind law is flawed for many reasons, but the most important is that it is built around proficiency targets. Proficiency rates are not useful metrics of school performance because universal proficiency is not a socially efficient goal for principals and teachers. Further, the...

We characterize the Laffer curves for labor taxation and capital income taxation quantitatively for the US, the EU-14 and individual European countries by comparing the balanced growth paths of a neoclassical growth model featuring â€constant Frisch elasticity†(CFE) preferences. We...

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives have been blamed for increasing systemic risk. Although OTC derivatives were not a central cause of the crisis, the complexity and limited transparency of the market reinforced the potential for excessive risk-taking,...

An infinite game is approximated by restricting the players to finite subsets of their pure strategy spaces. A strategic approximation of an infinite game is a countable subset of pure strategies with the property that limits of all equilibria of all sequences of approximating games whose finite...

We quantify the fiscal multipliers in response to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. We extend the benchmark Smets-Wouters (2007) New Keynesian model, allowing for credit-constrained households, the zero lower bound, government capital and distortionary taxation. The...

This paper uses a large natural field experiment to identify the effects of formal savings on interhousehold transfers in villages, and the spillover impacts of service-expansion on de facto ineligibles residing in the same community. Despite widespread interest in microfinance, spillover...

If people face cognitive limitations or biases that lead to financial mistakes, what are possible ways lawmakers can help? One approach is to remove the option of the bad decision; another approach is to increase financial education such that individuals can reason through choices when they...

This paper derives necessary and sufficient conditions for nonparametric transformation models to be (i) correctly specified, and (ii) identified. Our correct specification conditions come in a form of partial differential equations; when satisfied by the true distribution, they ensure that the...

Recent analyses of transaction-level datasets have generated new stylized facts on price setting and greatly influenced the empirical macroeconomics literature. This work has uncovered marked heterogeneity in price stickiness, demonstrated that even non-zero price changes do not fully "pass...

Funding for medical residencies has been capped by US Congress since the late 1997, and has resultantly become an increasingly limiting factor of the doctor supply in the US. The resulting impact of Medicare residency policy on managed care firms, especially private insurers has been unclear....