Nowcasting Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change

By Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Data from digital platforms have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification, both by predicting gentrification and by characterizing the local economy of gentrifying neighborhoods. To explore, we identify gentrifying neighborhoods using ...

Misperceptions about Tax Audits

By Marcelo Bérgolo, Rodrigo Ceni, Guillermo Cruces, Matias Giaccobasso, and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

For some entities, the utility-maximizing evasion rate depends substantially on tax audit features, such as audit probabilities and penalty rates. Bergolo et al. (2017) document large misperceptions about these features. In this paper, we expand the analy...

Ramsey Strikes Back: Optimal Commodity Tax and Redistribution in the Presence of Salience Effects

By Hunt Allcott, Benjamin Lockwood, and Dmitry Taubinsky

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

An influential result in modern optimal tax theory, the Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) theorem, holds that for a broad class of utility functions, all redistribution should be carried out through labor income taxation, rather than differential taxes on co...

Can Information Change Personal Retirement Savings? Evidence from Social Security Benefits Statement Mailings

By Susan Payne Carter and William Skimmyhorn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Despite concern about the viability of public retirement programs and potential undersaving for retirement, we still know little about the impact of government provided information on individual behavior. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposu...

Rationalizations and Mistakes: Optimal Policy with Normative Ambiguity

By Jacob Goldin and Daniel Reck

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Behavior that appears to violate neoclassical assumptions can often be rationalized by incorporating an optimization cost into decision-makers' utility functions. Depending on the setting, these costs may reflect either an actual welfare loss for the deci...

The Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth

By Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We present new evidence on global inequality and growth since 1980 using the World and Wealth Income Database. We plot the curve of cumulated growth from 1980 to 2016 by percentile of the global distribution of income per adult. This curve has an elephant...

From Communism to Capitalism: Private versus Public Property and Inequality in China and Russia

By Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, Li Yang, and Gabriel Zucman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth, and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China and Russia over...

Applying Generalized Pareto Curves to Inequality Analysis

By Thomas Blanchet, Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Clara Martínez-Toledano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

A generalized Pareto curve is defined as the curve of inverted Pareto coefficients b(p), where b(p) is the ratio between average income or wealth above rank p and the p-th quantile. We present this concept and show how it can be used to better estimate di...

Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa

By Lydia Assouad, Lucas Chancel, and Marc Morgan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper presents new findings about inequality dynamics in Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa from the World Inequality Database (WID.world). We combine tax data, household surveys, and national accounts in a systematic manner to produce ...

Challenges in the Measurement of Leakage Risk

By Meredith Fowlie and Mar Reguant

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Concerns about emissions leakage, i.e., the increase in emissions in foreign jurisdictions induced by a domestic emissions regulation, loom large in debates about unilateral climate change policy. Correctly identifying the kinds of economic activities mos...

How Trade Sensitive Are Energy-Intensive Sectors?

By Carolyn Fischer and Alan K. Fox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

For most governments looking to implement climate policy—and for interest groups looking to influence it—the effect of unilateral greenhouse gas regulation on employment, production, and emissions represents an overarching concern. Critical to improvi...

Regulating Mismeasured Pollution: Implications of Firm Heterogeneity for Environmental Policy

By Eva Lyubich, Joseph Shapiro, and Reed Walker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper provides the first estimates of within-industry heterogeneity in energy and CO2 productivity for the entire US manufacturing sector. We measure energy and CO2 productivity as output per dollar energy input or per ton CO

Is Altruism Sensitive to Scope? The Role of Tangibility

By Alex Imas and George Loewenstein

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Prior work has shown that people appear insensitive to the scope of their altruistic acts and prosocial behavior. While they respond positively when their choices lead to increasing rewards for themselves, people do not change their behavior when the outc...

Mental Budgeting versus Relative Thinking

By Samuel Hirshman, Devin Pope, and Jihong Song

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In many situations, mental budgeting and relative thinking predict results that are in opposing directions. We study a situation of this type and provide evidence for when the predictions of one model will dominate the other.

When Nudges Are Forever: Inertia in the Swedish Premium Pension Plan

By Henrik Cronqvist, Richard H. Thaler, and Frank Yu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

To inform economists and policymakers about whether the effects of nudges are persistent in one specific context, we study the choice architecture of the Swedish Premium Pension Plan. The data we study consist of all initial choices and subsequent rebalan...

Cross-Country Differences in Household Stock Market Participation: The Role of Gender Norms

By Da Ke

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

What explains substantial variation across countries in household stock market participation? Building on Ke (2018), I hypothesize that the prevailing gender norm in a country is an important cultural factor. In a cross-country analysis, I find that house...

Gender Norms and Relative Working Hours: Why Do Women Suffer More Than Men from Working Longer Hours Than Their Partners?

By Sarah Fleche, Anthony Lepinteur, and Nattavudh Powdthavee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husband's, the wife reports lower life s...

The Language of Discrimination: Using Experimental versus Observational Data

By Aislinn Bohren, Alex Imas, and Michael Rosenberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

We use experimental and observational data to examine whether people respond differently to questions posed by females versus males. We document significant differences in the language of responses, both in terms of the distribution of language utilized, ...

Gendered Language on the Economics Job Market Rumors Forum

By Alice H. Wu

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper examines the existence of an unwelcoming or stereotypical culture using evidence on how women and men are portrayed in anonymous discussions on the Economics Job Market Rumors forum (EJMR). I use a Lasso-Logistic model to measure gendered langu...

Representations of Men and Women in Introductory Economics Textbooks

By Betsey Stevenson and Hanna Zlotnik

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper examines the frequency and ways in which men and women appear in principles of economics textbooks. Men account for more than 90 percent of business leaders, policymakers, and economists mentioned in textbooks. In addition, women are a minority...