How should we measure economic efficiency? The canonical measure is an unweighted sum of willingnesses to pay. In contrast, this paper provides efficient welfare weights that implement the Kaldor-Hicks tests for efficiency but account for the distortionary cost of taxation. The shape of the...

This paper illustrates how one can use causal effects of a policy change to measure its welfare impact without decomposing them into income and substitution effects. Often, a single causal effect suffices: the impact on government revenue. Because these responses vary with the policy in...

Across a wide set of non-group insurance markets, applicants are rejected based on observable, often high-risk, characteristics. This paper argues private information, held by the potential applicant pool, explains rejections. I formulate this argument by developing and testing a model in which...

Revealed-preference measures of willingness to pay (WTP) capture the value of insurance only against the risk that remains when choosing insurance. This paper provides a method to translate observed market WTP and cost curves into an ex-ante value of insurance that can analyze the impact of...

Across a wide set of non-group insurance markets, applicants are rejected based on observable, often high-risk, characteristics. This paper argues private information, held by the potential applicant pool, explains rejections. I formulate this argument by developing and testing a model in which...

We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional...

This paper develops a tractable method for resolving the equity-efficiency tradeoff that modifies the Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle to account for the distortionary cost of redistribution. Weighting measures of individual surplus by the inequality deflator corresponds to searching for...

This paper illustrates how one can use causal effects of a policy change to measure its welfare impact without decomposing them into income and substitution effects. Often, a single causal effect suffices: the impact on government revenue. Because these responses vary with the policy in...

This paper analyzes Thailand's 2001 healthcare reform, "30 Baht." The program increased funding available to hospitals to care for the poor and reduced copays to 30 Baht (~$0.75). Our estimates suggest the supply-side funding of the program increased healthcare utilization, especially among the...