Why Are Relatively Poor People Not More Supportive of Redistribution? Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment across Ten Countries

By Christopher Hoy and Franziska Mager

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

We test a key assumption underlying seminal theories about preferences for redistribution, which is that relatively poor people should be the most in favor of redistribution. We conduct a randomized survey experiment with over 30,000 participants across 1...

Do Value-Added Taxes Affect International Trade Flows? Evidence from 30 Years of Tax Reforms

By Youssef Benzarti and Alisa Tazhitdinova

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

This paper uses all value-added tax (VAT) changes across EU Member States from 1988 to 2016 to estimate the effect of VATs on trade flows. We find small elasticities of trade flows with respect to VATs, even when VAT changes are large. These elasticities ...

Collaborative Tax Evasion in the Provision of Services to Consumers: A Field Experiment

By Annabelle Doerr and Sarah Necker

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

We conduct a field experiment with sellers of home improvement services on two German online markets. We take the role of consumers and vary whether we request an invoice for the delivery of the service. In a market that allows anyone to sell anonymously,...

Market Power and Income Taxation

By Louis Kaplow

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

This article analyzes concerns about market power and inequality in a model with multiple sectors, heterogeneous abilities, endogenous labor supply, and nonlinear income taxation. Proportional markups with no profit dissipation have no effect on the econo...

The Effects of the 1930s HOLC "Redlining" Maps

By Daniel Aaronson, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

This study uses a boundary design and propensity score methods to study the effects of the 1930s-era Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) "redlining" maps on the long-run trajectories of urban neighborhoods. The maps led to reduced home ownership rates, ho...

Russell Sage Foundation Opportunities

[News]

October 29, 2021

View upcoming opportunities from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Consumption Inequality and the Frequency of Purchases

By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Dmitri Koustas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We document a decline in the frequency of shopping trips in the United States since 1980 and consider its implications for the measurement of consumption inequality. A decline in shopping frequency as households stock up on storable goods (i.e., inventory...

Measuring consumption inequality

[Research Highlight]

October 21, 2021

Warehouse stores reduce the frequency of shopping trips.

References for Best Practices for Economists

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AEA Washington Representative - Scope of Work

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AEA seeks Washington Representative

[News]

November 03, 2016

The AEA seeks a part-time professional to represent the AEA's scientific interests in Washington DC

AEASTAT: 2022 Annual Meeting

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Sessions for AEA Committee on Economic Statistics, 2022 ASSA meetings

Sharing fake news

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Overconfidence in detecting lies may be helping them spread.

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Rising Geographic Disparities in US Mortality

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Benjamin K. Couillard, Christopher L. Foote, Kavish Gandhi, Ellen Meara, and Jonathan Skinner

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The twenty-first century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this paper, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent between 1992 and 2016. This was not simply beca...

The Causal Effects of Place on Health and Longevity

[Symposium: Geographic Disparities in Health]

By Tatyana Deryugina and David Molitor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from ...

When Innovation Goes Wrong: Technological Regress and the Opioid Epidemic

By David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The fourfold increase in opioid deaths between 2000 and 2017 rivals even the COVID-19 pandemic as a health crisis for America. Why did it happen? Measures of demand for pain relief—physical pain and despair—are high and in many cases rising, but their...

Neighborhoods Matter: Assessing the Evidence for Place Effects

By Eric Chyn and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental an...