Spillover, Efficiency, and Equity Effects of Regional Firm Subsidies

By Sebastian Siegloch, Nils Wehrhöfer, and Tobias Etzel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

We analyze the effects of a large place-based policy, subsidizing up to 50 percent of the investment costs of East German manufacturing plants. We show that a 1 percentage point decrease in subsidy rate leads to a 1 percent decrease in manufacturing emplo...

Policymaking, Trust, and the Demand for Public Services: Evidence from a Mass Sterilization Campaign

By Gianmarco León-Ciliotta ⓡ Dijana Zejcirovic ⓡ Fernando Fernandez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

We study a large-scale family planning intervention in which more than 260,000 Peruvian women were sterilized. Many of these medical procedures are alleged to have been performed without patient consent. The subsequent disclosure of alleged illegal steril...

The Great Recession and the Widening Income Gap between Alumni of Elite and Less Selective Universities

By Russell Weinstein

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Using mobility report card data, I show the income gap between alumni of elite and less selective universities widened for cohorts graduating during the Great Recession. This is evident for mean and median incomes and access to high earning percentiles. R...

Electronic Payment Technology and Tax Compliance: Evidence from Uruguay's Financial Inclusion Reform

By Anne Brockmeyer and Magaly Sáenz Somarriba

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Does the digitization of transactions in an economy increase tax compliance? We study the effect of financial incentives on the adoption of electronic payment technology and on tax compliance by firms. Exploiting administrative data and policy variation f...

My Taxes Are Too Darn High: Why Do Households Protest Their Taxes?

By Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

In the United States and globally, taxpayers can file a protest to legally reduce their property taxes. While tax protests can provide a unique opportunity to study the (un)willingness to pay taxes, they have received little attention from researchers. Us...

Fighting Poverty One Family at a Time: Experimental Evidence from an Intervention with Holistic, Individualized, Wraparound Services

By William N. Evans, Shawna Kolka, James X. Sullivan, and Patrick S. Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Families in poverty face numerous barriers to establishing stable economic footing. This paper estimates experimental effects of a holistic, individualized wraparound service intervention for low-income individuals. The intervention includes a detailed as...

Fueling Alternatives: Gas Station Choice and the Implications for Electric Charging

By Jackson Dorsey, Ashley Langer, and Shaun McRae

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

This paper quantifies the value of electric vehicle (EV) charging networks and the marginal value of network speed and density. We estimate a model of gasoline drivers' refueling preferences and simulate how these potential future EV drivers value refueli...

The Long-Run Effects of California's Paid Family Leave Act on Women's Careers and Childbearing: New Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design and US Tax Data

By Martha Bailey, Tanya Byker, Elena Patel, and Shanthi Ramnath

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

We use administrative tax data to analyze the cumulative, long-run effects of California's 2004 Paid Family Leave Act (CPFL) on women's employment, earnings, and childbearing. A regression-discontinuity design exploits the sharp increase in the weeks of p...

Profit Taxation, R&D Spending, and Innovation

By Andreas Lichter, Max Löffler, Ingo E. Isphording, Thu-Van Nguyen, Felix Poege, and Sebastian Siegloch

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

We study how profit taxes affect establishments' R&D activities. Relying on detailed panel data of R&D-active firms in Germany over two decades, we exploit identifying variation induced by more than 10,000 municipal changes in the local business tax rate ...

Who Bears the Burden of Local Taxes?

By Marius Brülhart, Jayson Danton, Raphaël Parchet, and Jörg Schläpfer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

We study the distributional effects of local taxes. They turn out to be strikingly progressive. We calibrate a municipality-level structural model with quasi-experimental estimates of taxpayer mobility by family type. Households with children are found to...

Targeting Nominal Income Growth or Inflation?

By Henrik Jensen

American Economic Review, September 2002

Within a simple New Keynesian model emphasizing forward-looking behavior of private agents, I evaluate optimal nominal income growth targeting versus optimal inflation targeting. When the economy is mainly subject to shocks that do not involve monetary po...

The Negative Consequences of Loss-Framed Performance Incentives

By Lamar Pierce, Alex Rees-Jones, and Charlotte Blank

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Behavioral economists have proposed that incentive contracts result in higher productivity when bonuses are "loss framed"—prepaid then clawed back if targets are unmet. We test this claim by randomizing the pre- or postpayment of sales bonuses at 294 ca...

Effective Health Aid: Evidence from Gavi's Vaccine Program

By Gauri Kartini Shastry and Daniel L. Tortorice

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has provided over US$16 billion in funding for vaccination in low- and middle-income countries since 1999. We exploit differential timing across countries and vaccines to estimate the effects of this public health initiative. We...

Did the Elimination of Mandatory Retirement Affect Faculty Retirement?

By Orley Ashenfelter and David Card

American Economic Review, September 2002

A special exemption from the 1986 Age Discrimination Act allowed colleges and universities to enforce mandatory retirement of faculty at age 70 until 1994. We construct a survey that permits us to compare faculty turnover rates before and after the law ch...

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2025

The 2023 Merger Guidelines and the Arc of Antitrust History

[Symposium: The 2023 Merger Guidelines and Beyond]

By Daniel Francis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2025

In 2023, the federal antitrust agencies rewrote the nation's flagship merger policy document, as part of a broader "Neo-Brandeisian" effort to bring about a deep reform of the antitrust system. The result—the 2023 Merger Guidelines—has been highly con...

Improving Economic Analysis in Merger Guidelines

[Symposium: The 2023 Merger Guidelines and Beyond]

By Louis Kaplow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2025

Merger review should reflect basic precepts of decision analysis, best practices in industrial organization economics, and teachings from related fields. Unfortunately, the analytical methods in modern merger guidelines fall short. Protocols violate stand...

Acquisitions to Enter New Markets

[Symposium: The 2023 Merger Guidelines and Beyond]

By Carl Shapiro

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2025

How should antitrust enforcers treat acquisitions by successful firms to enter new markets? Should a major pharmaceutical company with an extensive sales and distribution network be permitted to acquire a popular drug that does not compete against any of ...

Two Histories of the Public Safety Net

[Symposium: US Safety Net]

By Christopher Howard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2025

Although poverty in the United States has declined over the last half century, it remains a serious problem. This article charts the historical development of the public safety net, starting with means-tested programs and then adding inclusive social insu...

Geography of the Family

By Kai A. Konrad, Harald Künemund, Kjell Erik Lommerud, and Julio R. Robledo

American Economic Review, September 2002

We study the residential choice of siblings who are altruistic towards their parents. The firstborn child's location choice influences the behavior of the second-born child and can shift some of the burden of providing care for the parents from one child ...