AbstractWe use newly linked tax records to show that the large responses of UK company owner-managers to personal taxes are due to intertemporal income shifting and not to reductions in real business activity. Around half of this shifting is short-term…
AbstractDuring the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–191…
AbstractCan revenue sharing of resource rents be a source of distributive conflict? Can cohesive institutions avoid such conflicts? We exploit exogenous variation in local government revenues and new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria to …
AbstractAre firms sophisticated maximizers, or do they appear to make mistakes? Using transaction data from Ugandan value-added tax returns, we show that sellers and buyers report different amounts 79% of the time, despite invoices being easily cross-c…
AbstractWe study the circumstances under which public pressure affects judging. We show that crowd pressure biases decisions in favor of the crowd for “subjective decisions” with respect to which the judge has more discretion but not for “objective dec…
AbstractWe evaluate the effect of vehicle recalls on vehicle transactions in the second-hand market. Using a rich data set of Dutch vehicle registrations, we exploit the quasiexperimental variation in recalls across nearly identical cars. We find stron…
AbstractSimple functional forms for utility require restrictive structural assumptions that are often contrary to observed behavior. Even so, they are widely used in applied economic research. I address this issue using a two-part adaptive experimental…
AbstractWe study how homeowners’ consumption responds to a negative and anticipated disposable income shock: the beginning of the amortization period on interest-only mortgages. We identify spending behavior through an event study approach, by matching…
AbstractBiofuels offer one approach for reducing carbon emissions. However, the necessary agricultural expansion may endanger tropical forests. I use a dynamic model of land use to disentangle the roles of acreage and yields in the supply of sugarcane …
AbstractWe estimate the effects of student loan access on educational attainment and labor market returns in New Zealand. We exploit the introduction of a national policy mandating a 50% pass rate for student loan renewals using a regression discontinu…