When is a wealth tax preferable to a capital income tax? When is the opposite true? More generally, can capital taxation be structured to improve productivity, incentivize innovation, and ultimately increase welfare? We study these questions theoretically in an infinite-horizon model with...

We construct the first consistent market rent and home sales price series for American cities across the 20th century using millions of newspaper real estate listings. Our findings revise several stylized facts about U.S. housing markets. Real market rents did not fall during the 20th century...

Economic policies often involve dynamic interventions, where individuals receive repeated interventions over multiple periods. This dynamics makes past responses informative to predict future responses and ultimate outcomes depend on the history of interventions. Despite these phenomena,...

We characterize the conditions under which the wage distributions for two groups are consistent with a general model of statistical discrimination. We adapt this theoretical characterization to develop a novel empirical test, the rejection of which we interpret as evidence of taste-based...

Inflation targets were introduced well ahead of the development of the theory of inflation targeting. The practice was successful because it comprised a new set of procedures and institutions for setting monetary policy in a transparent and accountable fashion - "constrained discretion"; the...

Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, yet little is known about the capacity of firms to withstand such disasters and adapt to their increased frequency. We examine this issue using a the latest wave of the World Management Survey (WMS) that includes new questions on firms'...

We find that variation in expected U.S. productivity explains over half of U.S. dollar/G7 exchange rate fluctuations. Both correctly-anticipated changes in productivity and expectational noise, which influences the expectation of productivity but not its eventual realization, have large effects....

The 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion increased government benefits to families, and especially to families with the lowest incomes. Economic theory predicts that this policy intervention would have led to a reduction in labor supply among adults in those families. Our review of available...

Least squares regression with heteroskedasticity consistent standard errors ("OLS-HC regression") has proved very useful in cross section environments. However, several major difficulties, which are generally overlooked, must be confronted when transferring the HC technology to time series...

We examine how one of the largest U.S. place-based economic development programs, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988, with annual revenues in excess of \$40 billion, affects local firm total employment and sales through direct channels and through IGRA's effects on adjacent...