We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six week deadline to submit a referee report, a group with a four week deadline, a cash...

How can price elasticities be identified when agents face optimization frictions such as adjustment costs or inattention? I derive bounds on structural price elasticities that are a function of the observed effect of a price change on demand, the size of the price change, and the degree of...

This paper derives empirically implementable formulas for the incidence and efficiency costs of taxation that account for tax salience effects as well as other optimization errors. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the formulas imply that the economic incidence of a tax depends on its statutory...

The debate between "structural" and "reduced-form" approaches has generated substantial controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public economics that combines the advantages of reduced-form strategies -- transparent and credible identification -- with an...

This paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance (UI) benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from UI using this evidence. I show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by UI benefits is due to a...

Since Feldstein (1999), the most widely used method of calculating the excess burden of income taxation is to estimate the effect of tax rates on reported taxable income. This paper reevaluates the taxable income elasticity as a measure of excess burden when individuals can evade or avoid taxes....

This paper shows that existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model. I derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion (g) in terms of (1) the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to the wage elasticity...

It is well known that unemployment benefits raise unemployment durations. This result has traditionally been interpreted as a substitution effect caused by a distortion in the price of leisure relative to consumption, leading to moral hazard. This paper questions this interpretation by showing...

In an influential paper, Baily (1978) showed that the optimal level of unemployment insurance (UI) in a stylized static model depends on only three parameters: risk aversion, the consumption-smoothing benefit of UI, and the elasticity of unemployment durations with respect to the benefit rate....

Studies of the consumption-smoothing benefits of unemployment insurance (UI) have found that the optimal benefit level is very small, perhaps even 0, for conventional levels of risk aversion. In this paper, I derive a formula for the optimal benefit rate in terms of income and price elasticities...