Subsidizing Fuel-Efficient Cars: Evidence from China's Automobile Industry

By Chia-Wen Chen, Wei-Min Hu, and Christopher R. Knittel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

This paper examines the response of vehicle purchase behavior to China's largest national subsidy program for fuel-efficient vehicles during 2010 and 2011. Using variation from the program's eligibility cutoffs and the rollout of the subsidy program, the ...

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,...

Democracy and Aid Donorship

By Angelika J. Budjan and Andreas Fuchs

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

Almost half of the world's states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article introduces a new dataset on aid giving that covers all countries in the world, both rich and po...

Disclosure and Subsequent Innovation: Evidence from the Patent Depository Library Program

By Jeffrey L. Furman, Markus Nagler, and Martin Watzinger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

How important is access to patent documents for subsequent innovation? We examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Patent libraries provided access to patents before the Internet. We find that after patent library opening, loca...

Program Recertification Costs: Evidence from SNAP

By Tatiana Homonoff and Jason Somerville

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

Participants in means-tested programs must periodically document eligibility through a recertification process. If all cases that fail recertification are ineligible, the exact timing of this process should be irrelevant. We find that later recertificatio...

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...

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 Constitutional Dilemma of Economic Liberty

[Symposium: Institutions]

By Barry R. Weingast

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

This paper studies the problem of self-enforcing constitutions, addressing the question, how do some constitutions provide incentives for political officials to abide by the constraints announced in the constitution? To understand the mechanisms underlyin...

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...

Network Externality and Subsidy Structure in Two-Sided Markets: Evidence from Electric Vehicle Incentives

By Katalin Springel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

This paper uses new, large-scale vehicle registry data from Norway and a two-sided market framework to show nonneutrality of different subsidies and estimate their impact on electric vehicle adoption when network externalities are present. Estimates sugge...

Fiscal Transfers in the Spatial Economy

By Marcel Henkel, Tobias Seidel, and Jens Suedekum

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

Many countries shift substantial public resources across jurisdictions to mitigate spatial economic disparities. We use a general equilibrium model with multiple asymmetric regions, labor mobility, and costly trade to carve out the aggregate implications ...

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 ...

Urban Water Disinfection and Mortality Decline in Lower-Income Countries

By Sonia R. Bhalotra, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Grant Miller, Alfonso Miranda, and Atheendar S. Venkataramani

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

Historically, improvements in municipal water quality led to substantial mortality decline in today's wealthy countries. However, water disinfection has not consistently produced large benefits in lower-income countries. We study this issue by analyzing a...

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments: On Morals and Why They Matter to a Liberal Society of Free People and Free Markets

[Symposium: The Moral Sentiments]

By Jerry Evensky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

This essay describes Smith's analysis of ethics in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: the interaction of our nature and our nurturing that makes common civic ethics possible and the dynamic interaction of individuals and extant societal constructions that ca...

Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist

[Symposium: The Moral Sentiments]

By Nava Ashraf, Colin F. Camerer, and George Loewenstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

Adam Smith's psychological perspective in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is remarkably similar to "dual-process" frameworks advanced by psychologists, neuroscientists, and more recently by behavioral economists, based on behavioral data and detailed obser...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The Economics of Policing and Public Safety

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Emily Owens and Bocar Ba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of d...

Next-Generation Policing Research: Three Propositions

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Monica C. Bell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The Black Lives Matter movement has operated alongside a growing recognition among social scientists that policing research has been limited in its scope and outmoded in its assumptions about the nature of public safety. This essay argues that social scie...

The US Pretrial System: Balancing Individual Rights and Public Interests

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Will Dobbie and Crystal S. Yang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effectiveness and fairness of the US pretrial system and discuss its policy implications. Despite the importance of this stage of the criminal legal process, researchers have only recently...

Fragile Algorithms and Fallible Decision-Makers: Lessons from the Justice System

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Jens Ludwig and Sendhil Mullainathan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

Algorithms (in some form) are already widely used in the criminal justice system. We draw lessons from this experience for what is to come for the rest of society as machine learning diffuses. We find economists and other social scientists have a key role...