Inequality

Stephie Fried

This paper develops a macro heterogeneous-agent model to quantify the distributional welfare impacts of higher temperatures from climate change across income groups in the United States. The …

Fatih Guvenen · Alisdair McKay · Conor Ryan

Guvenen, McKay, and Ryan estimate a stochastic income process for US male workers that simultaneously matches five empirical regularities from Social Security Administration administrative panel data …

Marc K Chan · Cain Polidano · Ha Vu · Roger Wilkins · Andrew Carter · Hang To

Governments across ten-plus countries — including Australia, the United States, Germany, and New Zealand — have introduced matching schemes to encourage low- and middle-income earners to contribute …

Lena Gerling · Arzu Kibris

This paper asks how individual-level exposure to internal armed conflict shapes social capital, specifically trust in institutions and trust in people. The question matters because trust is a core …

Peyman Firouzi Naeim · David W Johnston · Maryam Naghsh-Nejad

This paper examines how workplace environments shape the economic consequences that fall on mothers — but not fathers — when a child is diagnosed with cancer. The motivation is a gap in the …

Saki Bigio · Diego R Känzig · Pablo Sánchez · Conor Walsh

This paper quantifies the sources and distributional consequences of unexpected carbon price changes for European households using a money-metric welfare framework. The motivation is stark: while …

Patrick J. Kennedy · Christine L. Dobridge · Paul Landefeld · Jacob Mortenson

This paper estimates the firm- and worker-level effects of the corporate income tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) — the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history — to inform the …

Lucas Corrêa-Dias · Jordan J Norris · Heitor S Pellegrina

Food production accounts for roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and richer nations contribute disproportionately through meat-intensive diets and input-intensive farming. This …

Stephen Ayerst · Loren Brandt · Diego Restuccia

This paper asks how institutional distortions to factor markets affect not only the static allocation of inputs across farms but also the dynamic choices — crop selection and productivity-enhancing …

Philipp Hochmuth · Per Krusell · Kurt Mitman

This paper investigates how the EU's Fit-for-55 climate package will affect aggregate output and distribute its costs across the income distribution. The question matters because energy is a necessity …

Eugene Tan

This paper investigates how the illiquidity of entrepreneurial capital shapes investment dynamics and wealth inequality. The central question is whether entrepreneurship drives wealth heterogeneity or …

Tristany Armangué-Jubert · Tancredi Rapone · Alessandro Ruggieri

Firms are larger and grow faster over the life cycle in high-income countries, while labor markets in poorer countries are less competitive (employers hold more wage-setting power). The paper asks how …

Alessandro Ferrari · Francisco Queirós

Ferrari and Queirós ask why US recoveries have become progressively slower and argue that rising firm heterogeneity and market power — well-documented long-run trends — can substantially increase the …

Hyejoon Im · John McLaren

Im and McLaren (2025) ask whether globalization induces governments to weaken labor standards for workers — the so-called "race to the bottom" (RTB) hypothesis. The question has high stakes: advocates …

Nick Pretnar · Maria Feldman

The paper investigates why the U.S. health-services sector has simultaneously experienced a tripling of relative prices since 1948 and a rise in the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) share from …

Flavien Moreau · Ludovic Panon

Moreau and Panon ask how much cartels cost the aggregate economy — in terms of both total factor productivity and welfare — and find the losses are considerably larger than the received wisdom from …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Tanner Regan

Satellite nighttime lights (luminosity) are the dominant remote-sensing proxy for local economic conditions in low-income countries, yet their accuracy at fine spatial scales and over time has …

Isabel Cairó · Avi Lipton

This paper addresses two connected questions: why do Black workers face persistently higher and more volatile unemployment than white workers, and can the Federal Reserve's August 2020 shift from a …

Benjamin Bridgman · Berthold Herrendorf

The paper asks why the U.S. labor share has declined over the postwar period, and whether rising markups or capital deepening (automation, falling capital prices) is the primary driver. The authors …

Christian Bredemeier · Babette Jansen · Roland Winkler

This paper proposes a novel fiscal transmission channel through which government spending expansions reduce employer monopsony power in the labor market, generating larger fiscal multipliers and …

Junichi Fujimoto · David Lagakos · Mitchell VanVuren

This paper asks whether publicly funded ("free") secondary schooling in developing countries raises GDP per capita. The question is policy-relevant because many low-income countries — including Ghana, …

Ariel Karlinsky · Moses Shayo

Karlinsky and Shayo ask which governments manipulate public information, in which direction, and by how much — questions that are normally intractable because the ground truth is unobservable. The …

Nezih Guner · Christopher Rauh · Gustavo Ventura

Guner, Rauh, and Ventura document the scope, generosity, distributional impact, and time evolution of means-tested transfers to working-age US households, and provide parametric estimates of transfer …

Barton H. Hamilton · Andrés Hincapié · Emma C. Kalish · Nicholas W. Papageorge

This paper asks why medical innovation can widen health disparities even when it unambiguously improves health for everyone who takes it. The authors argue that the standard access-versus-preferences …

Tuo Chen · Chang-Tai Hsieh · Zheng (Michael) Song

Chen, Hsieh, and Song study the use of unofficial non-tariff barriers (NTBs) by China during the U.S.-China trade war of 2018–2019 and in the first year of the Phase 1 purchase agreement (2020). The …

Minsu Chang · Frank Schorfheide

This paper asks how conventional and informational monetary policy shocks affect the cross-sectional distributions of labor earnings, consumption, and financial income in the United States. The …

Thomas Douenne · Albert Jan Hummel · Marcelo Pedroni

This paper asks whether inequality and redistributive taxation should make climate policy more or less ambitious, and how optimal carbon taxes interact with optimal income taxes when households differ …

Mohamad Adhami · Mark Bils · Charles I. Jones · Peter J. Klenow

The paper asks how much economic progress looks different when one applies a total utilitarian welfare criterion — counting every person's flow utility — rather than the standard per-capita …

Frédéric Docquier · Stefano Iandolo · Hillel Rapoport · Riccardo Turati · Gonzague Vannoorenberghe

This paper investigates how the skill structure of globalization shocks — rather than globalization per se — drives the long-run evolution of populism across countries, making a unified empirical case …

Weizheng Lai · Lixin Colin Xu · Li Yang

Research question and motivation: How do civil wars affect long-term development, and through which institutional mechanisms? The paper studies the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) in Qing China, one of …

Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Debora Revoltella · Jan Svejnar · Christoph T. Weiss

This paper investigates why firms in the European Union exhibit wide dispersion in marginal revenue products (MRP) of capital and labor — a direct indicator of resource misallocation — and asks how …

Martin Shu

This paper asks whether worker self-selection, rather than slow technological progress, can explain the low measured labor productivity growth in the U.S. service sector — a phenomenon known as …

Loren Brandt · Ruochen Dai · Gueorgui Kambourov · Kjetil Storesletten · Xiaobo Zhang

This paper studies entrepreneurship and new firm creation in China through the lens of serial entrepreneurs (SEs) — individuals who establish more than one firm — contrasting them with non-serial …

Heejeong Kim · Jung Hwan Kim

U.S. outstanding student debt rose roughly 20-fold, from about $50 billion in 1985 to nearly $1 trillion in 2014 (about 7% of GDP), making it the second-largest form of household debt after mortgages.

Hans A. Holter · Serhiy Stepanchuk · Yicheng Wang

This paper investigates how the level and progressivity of personal income taxes shape entrepreneurial activity in the United States, contributing empirical evidence, theoretical intuition, and a …

Robert J Barro · V V Chari

Barro and Chari (2024) revisit the long-standing debate over optimal capital income taxation, unifying the Chamley-Judd zero-tax result, the Straub-Werning positive-tax amendment, and the …

Katrine Jakobsen · Henrik Kleven · Jonas Kolsrud · Camille Landais · Mathilde Muñoz

Proposals to tax top wealth (e.g., Saez and Zucman, 2019) face a recurring objection in public debate: that the wealthy will emigrate en masse and, because many are entrepreneurs, their departure will …

Corina Boar · Denis Gorea · Virgiliu Midrigan

Research question and motivation. A large literature argues that credit constraints are the dominant financial friction holding private businesses below their optimal scale, so that easing credit …

Jean-Félix Brouillette

Women accounted for only 3% of U.S. inventors in 1976 and still just 14% in 2023, a pace of convergence far slower than in law (3% to 49%) or medicine (6% to 46%) over the same period. Under the …

Maximilian Konradt · Giacomo Mangiante

This paper asks whether carbon pricing through the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) imposes economic costs that are unequally distributed across European regions, and whether those economic costs …

Thomas Bourany · Jordan Rosenthal-Kay

This paper asks who wins and loses from climate policies — carbon taxes, renewable subsidies, and carbon tariffs — across 193 heterogeneous countries, and by how much. The motivation is that the …

Julián Costas-Fernández · José-Alberto Guerra · Myra Mohnen

This paper asks whether proximity to transport infrastructure can sever the occupational tie between parents and children — a question with direct bearing on the debate over place-based versus …

Donggyu Lee

This paper asks whether the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policies (UMP) — specifically quantitative easing (QE) and forward guidance — exacerbated income and welfare inequality in the …

Horng Chern Wong

Why do some firms pay persistently higher wages for observably similar workers, and what role do firms' product-market power (monopoly/markups), labor-market power (monopsony/markdowns), and workers' …

Sarah Sander

This paper estimates the causal effects of universal daycare access on mothers' labor force participation, full-time employment, hours worked, and earnings across 34 years after the birth of their …

Titan Alon · Damien Capelle · Kazushige Matsuda

This paper proposes that university R&D is determined endogenously by competition for tuition and talented students in the market for higher education, and asks why universities fund research …

Maria Alsina-Pujols

This paper asks how the threat of forced climate migration — international displacement driven by climate-induced natural disasters — should alter optimal carbon taxation. The motivation is twofold.

Jung Sakong

Wealth in the US is far more concentrated than income, even among the bottom 99%. In 2013, the next-49% (above the bottom 50%) earned 4.7 times the income of the bottom 50% but held 6.5 times the net …

Melanie Wallskog · Nicholas Bloom · Scott Ohlmacher · Cristina Tello-Trillo

This paper investigates how within-firm pay inequality relates to firm-level labor productivity, using a novel linkage of three confidential U.S. Census Bureau datasets covering millions of workers at …

Juan J Dolado · Etienne Lalé · Hélène Turon

Dolado, Lalé, and Turon build a structural equilibrium model of the U.K. low-wage labour market to evaluate zero-hours contracts (ZHCs), employment agreements under which firms are not required to …

Philippe Bacchetta · Elena Perazzi

As central banks worldwide explore retail central bank digital currency (CBDC), the macroeconomic consequences depend heavily on how CBDC interacts with bank deposits. Prior work spans a wide range of …

Marc Folch · Luca Mazzone

Folch and Mazzone ask how undergraduate student debt shapes three intertwined post-college decisions — whether to pursue a post-bachelor (graduate) degree, the trajectory of earnings, and whether/when …

David Berger · Thomas Hasenzagl · Kyle Herkenhoff · Simon Mongey · Eric A. Posner

Antitrust review of mergers has historically focused almost entirely on harm to consumers (product-market monopoly), ignoring harm to workers (labor-market monopsony). Following the July 2021 White …

Jasmina Hasanhodzic · Laurence J. Kotlikoff

Hasanhodzic and Kotlikoff ask a question prior work assumed away: how large is generational risk, and can pay-go Social Security actually mitigate it? Earlier studies (Diamond, Bohn, Krueger-Kubler, …

Sebastian Graves · Victoria Gregory · Lars Ljungqvist · Thomas J. Sargent

How does endogenizing retirement (career-length) choice change the labor-supply and human-capital implications of the canonical Heckman, Lochner, and Taber (1998a, HLT) life-cycle general-equilibrium …

Filippo Pallotti · Gonzalo Paz-Pardo · Jiri Slacalek · Oreste Tristani · Giovanni L. Violante

This paper measures the heterogeneous first-order welfare effects of the 2021-2023 inflation surge across households in the four largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain). …

Ilyana Kuziemko · Nicolas Longuet-Marx · Suresh Naidu

Why have less-educated voters in the United States abandoned the Democratic Party over recent decades? The paper argues that the Democratic Party's evolution on economic policy — specifically its …

Ana Costa-Ramón · Michaela Slotwinski · Ursina Schaede · Anne Ardila Brenøe

This paper investigates whether information constraints — rather than fully forward-looking choices — contribute to mothers' reduced labor supply after childbirth, a key driver of gender inequality. …

Pedro Bordalo · Nicola Gennaioli · Giacomo Lanzani · Andrei Shleifer

Bordalo, Gennaioli, Lanzani, and Shleifer develop a cognitive theory of choice in which a decision maker's attention to the features of options is determined by her categorization of the current …

Andrea Matranga · Timur Natkhov

This paper investigates the origins of serfdom in early modern Russia, arguing that the institution consolidated primarily through political economy dynamics between the crown and a landholding …

Christian Bayer · Ralph Luetticke · M. Weiss · Yannik Winkelmann

This paper introduces the Distributional Endogenous Gridpoint Method (DEGM), a novel numerical technique for solving the distributional dynamics that arise in heterogeneous agent macroeconomic models. …

Eric Chyn · Diego Daruich

How should governments design neighborhood-based policies to improve long-run outcomes for children, once one accounts for general equilibrium (GE) forces—endogenous rents, neighborhood quality, …

Felipe Del Canto · John Grigsby · Eric Qian · Conor Walsh

The paper asks whether inflationary shocks are regressive, and demonstrates that the answer depends critically on the source of the shock. A single aggregate inflation statistic conceals radically …

Vitaly M. Bord · Agnes Kovacs · Patrick Moran

Should regulators restrict banks from proactively raising credit card limits using machine-learning algorithms, and if so, how? The paper asks: to what extent are bank-initiated credit limit increases …

Daron Acemoglu · Pascual Restrepo

Acemoglu and Restrepo examine the effects of automation in economies where labor market distortions cause some workers to earn rents—wages above their opportunity cost or outside option. The central …

Sydnee Caldwell · Ingrid Haegele · Jörg Heining

How prevalent is individual wage bargaining in the labor market, what determines firms' bargaining strategies, how do bargaining encounters unfold for workers, and does heterogeneity in bargaining …

Almut Balleer · Georg Duernecker · Susanne Forstner · Johannes Goensch

The paper asks two questions: (1) How do workers' biased expectations about job finding and job separation shape the labor market equilibrium and wages? (2) Are differences in expectation biases …

Anna Tompsett

This paper measures the causal effects of land transport infrastructure on economic activity, exploiting quasi-experimental variation in bridge construction over the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the …

Raj Chetty · Will Dobbie · Benjamin Goldman · Sonya R Porter · Crystal S Yang

This paper documents sharp divergent trends in intergenerational economic mobility by race and class in the United States across the 1978 to 1992 birth cohorts, and investigates the causal mechanisms …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Sandra Sequeira

This paper examines the impact of conflict-driven forced displacement on human capital accumulation using the Mozambican civil war (1977–1992) as the empirical setting. During this war, over four …

Abhay Aneja · Silvia Farina · Guo Xu

This paper asks whether exposure to greater female representation in the workplace can persistently reduce intergenerational gender gaps in labor market outcomes. The authors exploit the sudden, …

Felipe Gonçalves · Elisa Jácome · Emily Weisburst

This paper studies how immigration enforcement affects public safety, asking two questions: (1) what is the effect of increased enforcement on criminal victimization, and (2) how does increased …

Kristine W. Hankins · Morteza Momeni · David Sovich

Do import tariffs affect consumer credit terms, and does focusing solely on goods prices understate tariff pass-through to consumers? The paper also asks whether vertical integration -- specifically, …

Emil Holst Partsch · Ivan Petrella · Emiliano Santoro

Consumer durables account for a disproportionately large share of household expenditure fluctuations despite their small share of total private consumption. Two stylized facts motivate the paper: (1) …

Sara G Castellanos · Diego Jiménez-Hernández · Aprajit Mahajan · Eduardo Alcaraz Prous · Enrique Seira

This paper asks two related questions bearing on financial inclusion policy in developing countries: (1) How effective are credit card contract term changes — specifically interest rate reductions and …

Taha Choukhmane

Does automatic enrollment (auto-enrollment) in retirement savings plans increase lifetime wealth accumulation and welfare? The prior literature established large short-run participation effects but …

Amanda Dahlstrand

This paper asks whether digital platforms can improve healthcare outcomes by enabling needs-based matching between patients and physicians unconstrained by geography. Amanda Dahlstrand studies digital …

Alan J Auerbach · Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Daniel Murphy

This paper estimates the distributional and social consequences of Department of Defense (DOD) contract spending using a city-level (CBSA) panel dataset spanning 2005–2016. The research question is …

Ingrid Huitfeldt · Victoria Marone · Daniel Waldinger

This paper studies the design of dynamic reassignment mechanisms—centralized systems that must not only provide good initial matches but also accommodate changes in agents' preferences over time. The …

Panle Jia Barwick · Siyu Chen · Chao Fu · Teng Li

This paper estimates the causal effects of mobile app usage on college students' academic performance, physical health, and labor market outcomes, while separately identifying behavioral (endogenous) …

Amory Gethin

This paper constructs the first estimates of the aggregate and distributional effects of worldwide educational expansion since 1980 by developing a "distributional growth accounting" framework that …

Raj Chetty · David J Deming · John N Friedman

This paper studies why children from high-income families are more likely to attend Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago — 12 colleges total) and whether attending these …

Supreet Kaur · Sendhil Mullainathan · Suanna Oh · Frank Schilbach

The paper tests whether financial concerns distract workers sufficiently to meaningfully reduce their productivity, and whether receiving cash — by alleviating those concerns — can raise output even …

John Sturm Becko · André Sztutman

Can income tax schedules be justified as utilitarian-optimal without adopting extreme normative assumptions about how household welfare should be measured? The paper proposes a welfare criterion …

Diego Gentile Passaro · Fuhito Kojima · Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

This paper studies the labor market effects of "Equal Pay for Similar Work" (EPSW) policies — laws that require firms to pay equal wages to workers of different protected-class identities (e.g., …

Alessandra Peter

Most quantitative models of entrepreneurship assume that large firms are widely held and unconstrained; this paper documents that across the Eurozone they are frequently not, and asks what that …

Naoki Aizawa · Corina Mommaerts · Stephanie Rennane

This paper studies (1) how firm accommodation decisions respond to financial incentives in the context of workplace disability under workers' compensation, (2) what the causal effect of accommodation …

Nava Ashraf · Maxim Bakhtin · Erica Field · Alessandra Voena · Roberta Ziparo

This paper investigates whether information asymmetries within households about maternal health risk can explain persistent spousal disagreement over fertility in a high-fertility, …

Eduardo Azevedo · Jonathan Beauchamp · Richard Karlsson Linnér

This paper asks how much adverse selection would arise in critical illness insurance (CII) markets if consumers can observe polygenic indexes (PGIs) — genetic risk scores derived from millions of …

N. Meltem Daysal · Hui Ding · Maya Rossin-Slater · Hannes Schwandt

This paper studies the short- and long-term consequences of intra-household respiratory disease transmission from older to younger siblings in Danish families. The central research questions are: (1) …

Elena Capatina · Michael Keane

Capatina and Keane build and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings for U.S. men that incorporates health shocks, endogenous human capital accumulation via learning-by-doing, …

Davide Debortoli · Jordi Galí

By building three nested HANK economies and then constructing a deliberately simple two-agent counterpart for each, this paper argues that what household heterogeneity does to aggregate output can be …

Andrii Parkhomenko

This paper asks why job polarization and income inequality are higher in large U.S. cities, and proposes a novel housing-market mechanism that operates independently of — but interacts with — the …

Ben Weidmann · Joseph Vecci · Farah Said · Sonia Bhalotra · Achyuta Adhvaryu · Anant Nyshadham · Jorge Tamayo · David Deming

This paper develops a novel experimental method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance, and uses it to evaluate which characteristics predict managerial effectiveness and …

Elliott Ash · Daniel L Chen · Suresh Naidu

This paper quantifies the effect of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges — an intensive two-week economics training program run by the Law and Economics Center from 1976 to 1998 — on the …

Wooyong Lee

This paper studies linear panel data models where regression coefficients are individual-specific (random coefficients) and regressors may be predetermined — that is, sequentially exogenous rather …

Aprajit Mahajan · Christian Michel · Alessandro Tarozzi

This paper addresses two related problems: the formal identification of time-inconsistent preferences in dynamic discrete choice models with unobserved heterogeneous types, and the structural …

Per Krusell · Anthony A. Smith, Jr.

In a calibrated stochastic growth model where a continuum of households face partially uninsurable employment risk and can self-insure only by holding aggregate capital, the macroeconomic aggregates …

Sebastian Doerr · Thomas Drechsel · Donggyu Lee

The paper establishes a causal link from rising top income shares to reduced net job creation at small firms, working through a bank funding channel rooted in non-homothetic household portfolio …

Xincheng Qiu · Nicolò Russo

The paper provides the most comprehensive cross-country empirical characterisation of effective income tax functions to date, estimating the two-parameter log-linear tax function — pioneered by …

Sergio Villalvazo

This paper studies the cross-sectional dimension of Fisher's (1933) debt-deflation mechanism as it operates during Sudden Stop crises — episodes characterized by large, abrupt reversals in the current …

Kai Gehring · Paul Schaudt

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence that Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) — a remote-sensing-triggered, automated payout scheme for pastoralists — substantially reduces …

Esther Duflo · Pascaline Dupas · Elizabeth Spelke · Mark Walsh

This paper provides experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in rural …

Marianne Bertrand · Matilde Bombardini · Raymond Fisman · Francesco Trebbi · Eyub Yegen

This paper investigates whether institutional investors influence the political activities of their portfolio firms, using political action committee (PAC) giving as a window into the broader question …

Christoph Albert · Albrecht Glitz · Joan Llull

Why have immigrant-native wage gaps widened substantially across arrival cohorts in the United States since the 1960s, and why has the speed of wage convergence slowed? The paper argues that the …

Daniel Lewis · Davide Melcangi · Laura Pilossoph

Lewis, Melcangi, and Pilossoph estimate the unconditional distribution of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) using the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act (ESA) rebate payments, deploying Gaussian …

Abu Siddique · Michael Vlassopoulos · Yves Zenou

This paper investigates whether virtual contact — exposure to an outgroup through a documentary film — can promote interethnic harmony, and whether targeting network-central individuals amplifies …

Laurent Gobillon · Thierry Magnac · Sébastien Roux

This paper asks how wage inequalities build up over the life cycle when individual wage trajectories are plagued by interruptions in private-sector participation, and when the standard Missing At …

William R. Zame · Bertil Tungodden · Erik Ø. Sørensen · Shachar Kariv · Alexander W. Cappelen

This paper asks whether an individual's attitude toward risk in the personal domain (choices affecting only oneself) can be linked to that same individual's attitude toward risk in the social domain …

Virginia Minni

This paper asks why managers matter for firm performance, and specifically whether managers improve productivity by matching workers to better-suited jobs inside firms rather than through supervision, …

Renjie Bao · Jan De Loecker · Jan Eeckhout

This paper asks whether managers are paid for market power. Bao, De Loecker, and Eeckhout build a general equilibrium model in which firms compete oligopolistically in goods markets (following Atkeson …

Kozo Ueda

This paper asks whether heterogeneity in the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) stems from temporary circumstances (e.g., transient wealth shocks that tighten liquidity) or persistent personal …

Jack Mountjoy

This paper asks whether enrolling in an American public university generates positive net returns for marginal students — those who barely qualify for admission — and whether those returns justify …

Andreas Fagereng · Luigi Guiso · Luigi Pistaferri

Using Norwegian administrative registries that record wealth and capital income for the whole population, and for each spouse before they marry, this paper documents that people sort at marriage not …

Alberto Bisin · Giulia Tura

Bisin and Tura study the cultural integration of immigrants in Italy by estimating a structural model of marital matching embedded with intra-household decisions — fertility, socialization of …

Hadi Elzayn · Evelyn Smith · Thomas Hertz · Cameron Guage · Arun Ramesh · Robin Fisher · Daniel E Ho · Jacob Goldin

Do Black taxpayers face higher IRS audit rates than non-Black taxpayers, despite race-blind audit selection? And if so, why — and what would mitigation look like?

David Berger · Kyle Herkenhoff · Simon Mongey

Can minimum wages improve welfare through efficiency — by correcting monopsony-driven under-employment — and, if so, by how much? What is the optimal minimum wage, and how much of the welfare gain …

Kelli Marquardt

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of ADHD diagnosis to decompose the mechanisms driving the observed 2.3:1 male-to-female diagnostic difference in the United States. The research …

Davide Debortoli · Jordi Galí

This paper asks how much of the HANK literature's message about aggregate behaviour survives in a far simpler model, and answers by first identifying exactly what heterogeneity does.

Anmol Bhandari · Tobey Kass · Thomas J. May · Ellen R. McGrattan · Evan Schulz

This paper uses a novel longitudinal administrative dataset drawn from U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) records to characterize income dynamics and the …

Daron Acemoglu · Daniel Huttenlocher · Asuman Ozdaglar · James Siderius

Acemoglu, Huttenlocher, Ozdaglar, and Siderius develop a two-sided platform model to study the welfare consequences of digital advertising as an online business model. The platform intermediates …

Jan Eeckhout · Chunyang Fu · Wenjian Li · Xi Weng

This paper asks whether and how optimal income taxation should change when firms have market power. The question is motivated by the documented rise in economy-wide markups since 1980, which has …

Yves Achdou · Francisco J. Buera · Jean-Michel Lasry · Pierre-Louis Lions · Benjamin Moll

Written explicitly to get mathematicians interested in macroeconomics, this review collects the systems of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations that arise once a macro model tracks a whole …

Michela Maria Tincani

This paper investigates the mechanisms behind peer effects in the classroom using exogenous variation in study disruptions generated by the 2010 Maule mega-earthquake in Chile (magnitude 8.8, the …

Menaka Hampole · Francesca Truffa · Ashley Wong

This paper investigates whether exposure to a larger share of female peers during an MBA program causally affects the gender gap in senior corporate leadership positions. The research question is …

Cecile Gaubert · Patrick Kline · Damian Vergara · Danny Yagan

Should national governments redistribute income to residents of poor areas through place-based transfers, or should redistribution rely solely on place-blind (income-only) taxes? The longstanding view …

Stefano DellaVigna · Woojin Kim

DellaVigna and Kim study the innovation and diffusion of policies across U.S. states using a dataset of over 700 state laws spanning seven decades.

Emanuele Colonnelli · Valdemar Pinho Neto · Edoardo Teso

Do individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes in the private sector? Specifically, do business owners sort copartisan workers into their firms, and does employers' …

Kazuo Mino · Hiroaki Sasaki

This paper asks how population aging changes the distribution of income and wealth, using a continuous-time overlapping-generations model in which persistent growth in per capita income is sustained …

José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez · Salvador Gil-Guirado · Nicholas Ryan

This paper studies rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. The central research question is: why do people believe that prayer can bring rain, even though it does not work?

Ayşe İmrohoroğlu · Çağrı S. Kumru · Jiu Lian

This paper asks whether racial differences in labor income can simultaneously explain both the crime gap and the wealth gap between Black and White individuals in the United States. The authors build …

Cody Tuttle

This paper studies racial disparities in federal criminal sentencing by analyzing abnormal bunching in the distribution of crack-cocaine amounts recorded at sentencing. The identifying variation comes …

Amir Kermani · Francis Wong

This paper estimates the racial/ethnic gap in realized housing returns using administrative data on individual housing transactions, and investigates the mechanisms that generate those gaps. The …

Manasvini Singh · Atheendar Venkataramani

Singh and Venkataramani ask whether resource scarcity causes discriminatory rationing of health care by patient race, with patient death as the starkest possible outcome of biased allocation …

Samuel Bazzi · Masyhur Hilmy · Benjamin Marx

This paper studies how Indonesia's Islamic education sector responded to one of the largest state-driven mass schooling expansions in history — the SD INPRES program (Sekolah Dasar Presidential …

Carolina Arteaga · Victoria Barone

This paper establishes a causal connection between the opioid epidemic and the political realignment toward the Republican Party in the United States from the mid-2000s through 2022. The …

Victor Gay · Paula E. Gobbi · Marc Goñi

Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi test Le Play's (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France's early fertility decline by abolishing impartible inheritance. In 1793, a series of decrees …

Ethan Ligon

This paper identifies and corrects a fundamental flaw in the standard methodology for testing efficient risk-sharing when shocks are covariate (affecting common prices rather than only individual …

Clement Imbert · Gabriel Ulyssea

Does rural-urban migration increase or decrease urban informality, and through what mechanisms — and does the answer depend on the time horizon?

Aram Grigoryan

Grigoryan (2021) develops a unified general-equilibrium framework that jointly models school assignment mechanisms and the housing market to evaluate the welfare and distributional consequences of …

Dirk Bergemann · Tibor Heumann · Michael C. Wang

Bergemann, Heumann, and Wang study consumer surplus when a monopolist simultaneously engages in second-degree price discrimination (screening consumers within each market segment through …

François Le Grand · Alaïs Martin-Baillon · Xavier Ragot

Should monetary policy deviate from price stability to address redistributive concerns in an economy with heterogeneous agents? The paper jointly solves for optimal monetary and fiscal policy under …

Duncan Webb

This paper examines how two types of communication about a minority group affect discriminatory behavior: (i) horizontal communication between majority-group members, and (ii) top-down communication …

Oren Danieli

This paper proposes a model of skill-replacing routine-biased technological change (SR-RBTC) to explain patterns in U.S. bottom-half wage inequality that standard RBTC models cannot account for.

Matthew J Delventhal · Andrii Parkhomenko

Delventhal and Parkhomenko build a quantitative spatial model of the United States to study how the rise of telecommuting reshapes the distribution of residents, jobs, and housing costs across and …

Daniel Haanwinckel

How do workforce composition (labor supply), labor demand, and minimum wage policy jointly determine the wage distribution in imperfectly competitive labor markets, and what were the quantitative …

Ingrid Haegele

This paper provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding in organizations — the practice whereby managers deliberately suppress workers' internal mobility to retain productive team members, …

Bryony Reich

This paper examines how the architecture of social networks shapes the success or failure of technology diffusion when adoption decisions exhibit strategic complementarities. The research question is: …

Samuel Bazzi · Andreas Ferrara · Martin Fiszbein · Thomas Pearson · Patrick A Testa

This paper investigates how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused Confederate culture and entrenched racial norms across the United States during a critical juncture of westward …

Joshua D Gottlieb · Maria Polyakova · Kevin Rinz · Hugh Shiplett · Victoria Udalova

What do U.S. physicians earn, how is that earnings variation structured across geography and specialty, and how much does government healthcare payment policy shape those earnings and — through them — …

Ulrika Ahrsjö · Costas Meghir · Mårten Palme · Marieke Schnabel

This paper studies the intergenerational effects of education policy on crime, asking whether a compulsory schooling reform that reduced crime among those directly exposed also reduced crime among …

Michael Frakes · Jonathan Gruber

This paper asks whether racial concordance between patients and medical providers — specifically, whether Black patients are treated by Black physicians — improves use of preventive care and reduces …

Kyle Greenberg · Melanie Wasserman · E Anna Weber

Greenberg, Wasserman, and Weber (2024/2026) ask whether men negatively respond—in terms of job performance, behavior, and workplace perceptions—when women first enter an exclusively male occupation. …

Elio Nimier-David · David Sraer · David Thesmar

This paper studies the causal effects of mandatory profit-sharing on workers and firms using a quasi-experimental design arising from a 1990 French reform that lowered the eligibility threshold for …

Raymond Kluender · Neale Mahoney · Francis Wong · Wesley Yin

This paper asks whether relieving downstream medical debt — debt that has been sold to third-party debt collectors — causes improvements in financial outcomes, mental and physical health, and …

Tanguy Bernard · Stefan Dercon · Kate Orkin · Giulio Schinaia · Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

This paper tests whether a light-touch behavioral intervention targeting aspirations can produce persistent economic effects on a poor rural population. The research question is whether changing how …

Moritz Kuhn · Iourii Manovskii · Xincheng Qiu

This paper asks why unemployment rates differ so persistently across local labor markets, and what role job creation and job destruction play in generating those differences. The authors document a …

Javier D Donna · José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez

Donna and Espín-Sánchez investigate whether a market (sequential English auction) or a non-market institution (fixed quota) more efficiently allocates an intermediate good — irrigation water — when …

Andrew Garin · Dmitri Koustas · Carl McPherson · Samuel Norris · Matthew Pecenco · Evan K. Rose · Yotam Shem-Tov · Jeffrey Weaver

This paper estimates the causal effect of incarceration on employment, wage earnings, self-employment, and tax filing behavior using administrative criminal justice data linked to Internal Revenue …

David A. Green · Ben M. Sand · Iain G. Snoddy · Jeanne Tschopp

This paper estimates the impact of unions on nonunion wage setting in the United States over the period 1980–2010, distinguishing two channels through which unions affect nonunion wages: (1) a …

Erik G. Hurst · Patrick Kehoe · Elena Pastorino · Thomas Winberry

This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power and putty-clay adjustment frictions in order to trace the time path of the effects of the federal …

Mikhail Golosov · Ilia Krasikov

What is the optimal joint nonlinear earnings tax schedule for married couples? How should one spouse's marginal tax rate depend on the other's earnings? When is individual earnings-based (separable) …

Natalia Emanuel · Emma Harrington · Amanda Pallais

This paper studies how physical proximity to coworkers affects on-the-job training and productivity, using software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer observed from 2019 to 2024. The authors …

David Chan · Yiqun Chen

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) versus physicians performing overlapping tasks in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) emergency departments (EDs), exploiting a …

Eliana Carranza · Aletheia Donald · Florian Grosset-Touba · Supreet Kaur

This paper asks whether informal redistributive pressure — the social obligation to share earned income with kin and social networks — distorts labor supply in low-income communities. The authors …

Natalie Bau · Gaurav Khanna · Corinne Low · Alessandra Voena

This paper asks whether dowry — a transfer from the bride's family to the groom's household upon marriage, prevalent throughout India — enables male migration by providing liquidity that compensates …

Christian Hellwig · Nicolas Werquin

Two of the most influential results in optimal tax theory — Saez's (2001) formula for the top income tax rate and Atkinson and Stiglitz's (1976) case for not taxing savings — are usually invoked …

Desmond Ang · Sahil Chinoy

This paper provides the first causal evidence on how military service shaped Black civil rights activism in the aftermath of World War I. The research question is whether random induction into the …

Ellora Derenoncourt · David Weil

This paper studies the labor market effects of voluntary minimum wages (VMWs) — company-wide, publicly announced wage floors set by large private employers — in the U.S. low-wage retail and service …

Sacha Dray · Camille Landais · Stefanie Stantcheva

Wealth data for the nineteenth-century United States barely exist, and this paper builds them from an unusual source: the paper trail of the General Property Tax, a levy that — unlike land taxes …

Daniel Björkegren · Joshua E Blumenstock · Samsun Knight

This paper asks a fundamental question about policy design: when a program prioritizes one group over another, is that because the group benefits more from the intervention, or because the policy …

John J Conlon · Dev Patel

Conlon and Patel test whether students stereotype the link between college majors and occupations — that is, whether they exaggerate the likelihood that majors lead to their "representative" careers …

Barbara Biasi · Julien Lafortune · David Schönholzer

This paper investigates which types of school facility investments benefit students (as measured by test scores) and are valued by homeowners (as measured by house prices), and for which student …

Zoë Cullen · Shengwu Li · Ricardo Perez-Truglia

This paper studies how salary benchmarking tools — products that reveal aggregate market pay statistics for specific job titles — affect employee compensation. The research question is whether firms' …

Marcella Alsan · Yousra Neberai

This paper investigates a critical juncture in the development of national health insurance (NHI) in the United States: the post-World War II period when most peer nations moved to establish …