Limning India’s Direct Tax Collection Contractions
The Indian Economic Journal, Ahead of Print. Indian direct tax collections have remained sluggish over the period coupled with the lesser tax buoyancy have compelled the government to collect revenues from the untapped or under-tapped sources to financ…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
Individualism during Crises
AbstractIndividualism has long been linked to economic growth. Using the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that such a culture can hamper the economy’s response to crises, a period with heightened coordination frictions. Exploiting variation in U.S. counties’…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
A Natural Experiment on Job Insecurity and Fertility in France
AbstractJob insecurity can have wide-ranging consequences outside of the labor market. A 1999 rise in the French layoff tax paid by large private firms when they laid off older workers made younger workers less secure; this insecurity reduced their fer…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
Fight or Flight: Endogenous Timing in Conflicts
AbstractWe study a dynamic game in which players compete for a prize. In a waiting game with two-sided private information about strength levels, players choose fighting, fleeing, or waiting. Players earn a “deterrence value” on top of the prize if the…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
The Role of Withholding in the Self-Enforcement of a Value-Added Tax: Evidence from Pakistan
AbstractI leverage the staggered rollout of VAT in Pakistan to document the role of withholding mechanism in the self-enforcement of a VAT. Focusing on firms already in the tax net, I see how their outcomes respond when the tax is extended upward to in…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
A Structural Model for the Coevolution of Networks and Behavior
AbstractThis paper introduces a structural model for the coevolution of networks and behavior. We characterize the equilibrium of the underlying game and adopt the Bayesian Double Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to estimate the model. We further extend t…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
Why Has the U.S. Economy Stagnated since the Great Recession?
AbstractSince the Great Recession in 2007–2009, U.S. real GDP has failed to return to its previously projected path, a phenomenon widely associated with secular stagnation. We investigate whether this stagnation was due to hysteresis effects from the G…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
Election by Community Consensus: Effects on Political Selection and Governance
AbstractThis paper evaluates the effects of encouraging the selection of local politicians in India via community consensus, as opposed to a secret ballot election. Using village-level data on candidates, elected politicians, government budgets, and wo…
The Review of Economics and Statistics
Gender and Willingness to Lead: Does the Gender Composition of Teams Matter?
AbstractWe explore how team gender composition affects willingness to lead by randomly assigning participants in an experiment to male- or female-majority teams. Irrespective of team gender composition, men are substantially more willing than women to …