Most policy changes generate winners and losers. Political economy and optimal policy suggest questions such as: Who wins, who loses? How much? Given a choice of welfare weights, what is the impact of the policy change on social welfare? This paper proposes a framework to empirically answer such...

This paper discusses nonparametric identification in a model of sorting in which location choices depend on the location choices of other agents as well as prices and exogenous location characteristics. In this model, demand slopes and hence preferences are not identifiable without further...

We provide a condition which is both necessary and sufficient for uniform validity of asymptotic approximations using the delta-method, that is for uniform negligibility of the remainder of such approximations. This condition is easily verified and permits to identify settings and parameter...

While the empirical literature on intergenerational mobility is politically controversial, it is not obvious what the implications of intergenerational status transmission for optimal policy are. Addressing this question, this paper studies the local comparative statics of optimal income taxes...

To what extent can changes in the distribution of wages be explained by changes in labor supply of various groups (due to demographic change, migration, or expanded access to education), and to what extent are other factors (technical and institutional change) at work? We develop a flexible...

In this paper, we study the effect of interview modes on estimates of economic inequality which are based on survey data. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in interview modes in the Austrian EU-SILC panel, where between 2007 and 2008 the interview mode was switched from personal interviews...

Changes in family structures, such as the composition of households with respect to size, age and gender, can have an impact on poverty rates and the income distribution more generally. We analyze the impact of changing family structures on the income distribution among adult Costa Rican women...

In this paper, a general framework is proposed for the use of (quasi-) experimental data when choosing policies such as tax rates or the level of inputs in a production process. The data are used to update expectations about social welfare as a function of policy, and the policy is chosen to...

This paper discusses experimental design for the case that (i) we are given a distribution of covariates from a pre-selected random sample, and (ii) we are interested in the average treatment effect (ATE) of some binary treatment. We show that in general there is a unique optimal non-random...

Many methodological debates in microeconometrics are driven by the tension between ``what we can get'' (identification) and ``what we want'' (parameters of interest). This paper proposes to consider models of policy choice which allow for a joint formal discussion of both issues. We consider a...