We use firm-level administrative data from Ecuador to study the implications of ‘reverse withholding’ for firms’ tax behavior. Withholding does not affect tax liability of firms, but it may result in a discontinuity in the audit probability around the withholding threshold. Exploiting...

Programs to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution by restricting use of motor vehicles on working days have generally not met with success, given existing studies of such programs. We conduct the first study of Quito, Ecuador's four-year-old Pico y Placa program and find that it has...

This paper computes several indicators of water coverage, quality, and prices in Ecuador's two largest cities: Quito and Guayaquil—both before and after the privatization of water services in Guayaquil. The type of data sources that are used make it possible to specifically control for income...

This paper takes advantage of a rich firm level data set from Ecuador to analyze the effects of a reform in 2007 that introduced imprisonment for tax evasion and made a firm's CFO liable for tax-crimes. Our dataset contains actual tax-return and financial-statement for the universe of...

We develop a new factor content approach to study the impact of trade on inequality. Our analysis generalizes the theoretical results of Deardorff and Staiger (1988) and improves on past empirical implementations of these results. Combined with unique administrative data from Ecuador, our...

This paper uses administrative data on families that participated in HUD's Section 8 Housing Voucher Program between 1995 and 2002 combined with data from other sources to estimate the differences in attrition rates between families that differ with respect to characteristics of greatest...

This paper uses administrative data on non-elderly, non-disabled households that received HUD rental assistance between 1995 and 2002 combined with data from other sources to estimate the effect of low-income housing programs on their labor earnings and employment. Using longitudinal data to...

How costly is the misallocation of production that we might expect to result from distortions such as market power, incomplete contracts, taxes, regulations, or corruption? This paper develops new tools for the study of misallocation that place minimal assumptions on firms’ underlying...

This paper demonstrates theoretically and empirically the conditions under which estimated implicit prices from hedonic equations using house value reflect implicit willingness to pay for housing attributes. Implicit prices obtained from rental hedonics, consistent with theory, reveal the...

Governments provide public information about economic conditions to reduce information imperfections and facilitate efficient allocation of resources. Do households in developing countries rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions? To identify the importance of public...