Hidden Baggage: Behavioral Responses to Changes in Airline Ticket Tax Disclosure

By Sebastien Bradley and Naomi E. Feldman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

We examine the impact of a January 2012 enforcement action by the US Department of Transportation that required US air carriers and online travel agents to modify their web interfaces to incorporate all ticket taxes in up-front, advertised fares. We show ...

Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

By Nur Cahyadi, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Rizal Adi Prima, Elan Satriawan, and Ekki Syamsulhakim

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Conditional cash transfers provide income and promote human capital investments. Yet evaluating their longitudinal impacts is hard, as most experimental evaluations treat control locations after a few years. We examine such impacts in Indonesia after six ...

Discrete Prices and the Incidence and Efficiency of Excise Taxes

By Christopher T. Conlon and Nirupama L. Rao

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

This paper uses UPC-level data to examine the relationship between excise taxes, retail prices, and consumer welfare in the distilled spirits market. We document a nominal rigidity in retail prices that arises because firms largely choose prices that end ...

Can Rationing Increase Welfare? Theory and an Application to India's Ration Shop System

By Lucie Gadenne

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

In many developing countries, households can purchase limited quantities of goods at a fixed subsidized price through ration shops. This paper asks whether the characteristics of developing countries explain why governments use such systems. I find an equ...

Accelerator or Brake? Cash for Clunkers, Household Liquidity, and Aggregate Demand

By Daniel Green, Brian T. Melzer, Jonathan A. Parker, and Arcenis Rojas

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

This paper evaluates the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) by comparing the vehicle purchases and disposals of households with eligible "clunkers" to those of households with similar but ineligible vehicles. CARS caused roughly 500,000 purchases during t...

The State of American Entrepreneurship: New Estimates of the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship for 32 US States, 1988–2014

By Jorge Guzman and Scott Stern

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Assessing the state of American entrepreneurship requires not simply counting the quantity but also the initial quality of new ventures. Combining comprehensive business registries and predictive analytics, we present estimates of entrepreneurial quantity...

Decompositions and Policy Consequences of an Extraordinary Decline in Air Pollution from Electricity Generation

By Stephen P. Holland, Erin T. Mansur, Nicholas Z. Muller, and Andrew J. Yates

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Using integrated assessment models, we calculate the economic value of the extraordinary decline in emissions from US power plants. Annual local and global air pollution damages fell from 245 to 133 billion USD over 2010–2017. Decomposition shows change...

Reported MPC and Unobserved Heterogeneity

By Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Panel data on reported marginal propensity to consume in the 2010 and 2016 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth uncover a strong negative relationship between cash on hand and MPC. Even though the relationship is attenuated when using regression ...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Bernard Saffran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

This section will list readings that may be especially useful to teachers of undergraduate economics, as well as other articles that are of broader cultural interest. In general, the articles chosen will be expository or integrative and not focus on origi...

Optimal Income Taxation with Present Bias

By Benjamin B. Lockwood

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Work often entails up-front effort costs in exchange for delayed benefits, and mounting evidence documents present bias over effort in the face of such delays. This paper studies the implications for the optimal income tax. Optimal tax rates are computed ...

How Antitrust Enforcement Can Spur Innovation: Bell Labs and the 1956 Consent Decree

By Martin Watzinger, Thomas A. Fackler, Markus Nagler, and Monika Schnitzer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Is compulsory licensing an effective antitrust remedy to increase innovation? To answer this question, we analyze the 1956 consent decree that settled an antitrust lawsuit against Bell, a vertically integrated monopolist charged with foreclosing the telec...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use th...

Business Incomes at the Top

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. We discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners, with the focus on clos...

Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Florian Hoffmann, David S. Lee, and Thomas Lemieux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies the contribution of both labor and non-labor income in the growth in income inequality in the United States and large European economies. The paper first shows that the capital to labor income ratio disproportionately increased among ...

An Economist's Guide to Epidemiology Models of Infectious Disease

[Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology]

By Christopher Avery, William Bossert, Adam Clark, Glenn Ellison, and Sara Fisher Ellison

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

We describe the structure and use of epidemiology models of disease transmission, with an emphasis on the susceptible/infected/recovered (SIR) model. We discuss high-profile forecasts of cases and deaths that have been based on these models, what went wro...

Comments

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003

Epidemiology's Time of Need: COVID-19 Calls for Epidemic-Related Economics

[Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology]

By Eleanor J. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted scientific conversations and scientific divisions into the public consciousness. Epidemiology and economics have long operated in distinct silos, but the COVID-19 pandemic presents a complex and cross-disciplinary prob...

A 30-Year Perspective on Property Derivatives: What Can Be Done to Tame Property Price Risk?

By Frank J. Fabozzi, Robert J. Shiller, and Radu S. Tunaru

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The housing sector is the largest spot market in the world without a developed derivative contract to serve the risk management needs of market participants. This paper describes the evolution within a wider economic context of property derivatives in the...

Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference

By Amy Finkelstein and Nathaniel Hendren

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

We describe a framework for empirical welfare analysis that uses the causal estimates of a policy's impact on net government spending. This framework provides guidance for which causal effects are (and are not) needed for empirical welfare analysis of pub...