This paper shows that social capital increases economic growth by raising government investment in human capital. We present a model of stochastic endogenous growth with imperfect political agency. Only some people correctly anticipate the future returns to current spending on public education....

Tax enforcement may affect both the behavior of those directly treated and of some taxpayers not directly treated but linked via a network to those who are treated. A large-scale randomized field experiment enables us to examine both the direct and network effects of letters and in-person visits...

We examine the fiscal and mobility consequences of the introduction of the income tax, a major investment in modern state capacity. Drawing on archival data, we introduce a novel panel dataset of U.S. states between 1900 and 2010. Our research design exploits the staggered introduction of the...

This paper shows that social capital increases economic growth by raising government investment in human capital. We present a model of stochastic endogenous growth with imperfect political agency. Only some people correctly anticipate the future returns to current spending on public education....

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, I present a novel instrumental variable strategy to allow researchers to study the consequences of state policy liberalism in panel data. Second, I study the consequences of state policy liberalism on education and inequality from the 1940s to 2014....

I present new quasi-experimental evidence on the relationship between tax policies and the distribution of income. I focus on the twentieth century United States, and on the personal income tax, since its inception. I study three major policy events that, as the existing literature shows,...