Many scholars see corruption as the main reason behind the poor development performance of many resource-rich economies, known as the resource curse. Some relate this to the shift in governments’ source of income from taxation to resource rents. Taxation is seen as a social contract through...

I consider the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, from late-1980s Gibbs sampling to present-day gradient-based methods and piecewise-deterministic Markov processes. In parallel, I show how these ideas have been implemented in successive generations of statistical software...

This article reviews recent progress in high-dimensional bootstrap. We first review high-dimensional central limit theorems for distributions of sample mean vectors over the rectangles, bootstrap consistency results in high dimensions, and key techniques used to establish those results. We then...

Innovation diffusion processes have attracted considerable research attention for their interdisciplinary character, which combines theories and concepts from disciplines such as mathematics, physics, statistics, social sciences, marketing, economics, and technological forecasting. The formal...

A stylized fact in criminology holds that those who commit crimes are more likely to be victims of crime, and vice versa. We use population-level administrative data of all police investigations in New Zealand to examine the possibility of this victim-offender overlap. Two-way fixed effects and...

Payroll taxes are usually designed to fund social insurance and not to contribute directly to redistribution. Over the last fifty years, France has modified dramatically the schedule of payroll taxation, turning it into the most progressive part of its tax system. Using administrative data and...

Governments have increasing access to individual information, but they exploit little of it when setting taxes. This paper shows how to reveal inequality aversion from observed tax policy choices of such governments. First, I map governments’ priorities into concerns for vertical and...

A stylized fact in criminology holds that those who commit crimes are more likely to be victims of crime, and vice versa. We use population-level administrative data of all police investigations in New Zealand to examine the possibility of this victim-offender overlap. Two-way fixed effects and...

This paper analyzes the existence of electoral cycles in infrastructure provision in the context of a large rural road building program in India. We use data covering 150,000 roads over a decade to demonstrate an increase in road building activity before state elections. These electoral cycles...

We study the optimal taxation of risk-free and excess capital income with heterogeneous rates of return, alongside an optimal nonlinear earnings tax. Households can hold three assets: one risk-free, one risky but diversifiable, and one a private investment with idiosyncratic risk whose expected...