The politics of tax evasion

[Research Highlight]

August 11, 2021

Julie Berry Cullen and Ebonya Washington discuss the ways in which attitudes toward government affect how people report income.

Political Alignment, Attitudes toward Government, and Tax Evasion

By Julie Berry Cullen, Nicholas Turner, and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

We ask whether attitudes toward government play a causal role in the evasion of US personal income taxes. As turnover elections move voters in partisan counties into and out of alignment with the party of the president, we find with alignment (i) taxpayer...

Uber versus Taxi: A Driver's Eye View

By Joshua D. Angrist, Sydnee Caldwell, and Jonathan V. Hall

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2021

Rideshare drivers pay a proportion of their fares to a ride-hailing platform operator, a commission-based compensation model used by many service providers. To Uber drivers, this commission is known as the Uber fee. By contrast, traditional taxi drivers...

What drives drivers?

[Research Highlight]

August 17, 2021

The preference for Uber's commission-based compensation over the fixed-fee arrangements of traditional taxis.

Health Inequality and COVID-19

[Page]

How have the effects of COVID-19 varied among different population groups in the United States?

The Labor Market for Teachers under Different Pay Schemes

By Barbara Biasi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform some districts sw...

Measuring Technological Innovation over the Long Run

By Bryan Kelly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Amit Seru, and Matt Taddy

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

We use textual analysis of high-dimensional data from patent documents to create new indicators of technological innovation. We identify important patents based on textual similarity of a given patent to previous and subsequent work: these patents are d...

A Simple Planning Problem for COVID-19 Lock-down, Testing, and Tracing

By Fernando Alvarez, David Argente, and Francesco Lippi

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

We study the optimal lock-down for a planner who controls the fatalities of COVID-19 while minimizing the output costs of the lock-down. The policy prescribes a severe lock-down beginning a few weeks after the outbreak, covering almost 50 percent of the p...

Is the Supply of Charitable Donations Fixed? Evidence from Deadly Tornadoes

By Tatyana Deryugina and Benjamin M. Marx

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

Do natural disasters increase charitable giving or simply reallocate a fixed supply of donations? We study this question using Internal Revenue Service data in the context of deadly tornadoes. We find that among zip codes located in the same state but mor...

The Difficulty of Easy Projects

By Wioletta Dziuda, A. Arda Gitmez, and Mehdi Shadmehr

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

We consider binary private contributions to public good projects that succeed when the number of contributors exceeds a threshold. We show that for standard distributions of contribution costs, valuable threshold public good projects are more likely to su...

Waning Immunity and the Second Wave: Some Projections for SARS-CoV-2

By Chryssi Giannitsarou, Stephen Kissler, and Flavio Toxvaerd

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

This paper offers projections of future transmission dynamics for SARS-CoV-2 in an SEIRS model with demographics and waning immunity. In a stylized optimal control setting calibrated to the United States, we show that the disease is endemic in steady stat...

A Behavioral Characterization of the Likelihood Ratio Order

By Maximilian Mihm and Lucas Siga

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

It is well known that stochastic dominance is equivalent to a unanimity property for monotone expected utilities. For lotteries over a finite set of prizes, we establish an analogous relationship between likelihood ratio dominance and monotone betweenness...

Jacks of All Trades and Masters of One: Declining Search Frictions and Unequal Growth

By Paolo Martellini and Guido Menzio

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

Declining search frictions generate productivity growth by allowing workers to find jobs for which they are better suited. For "jacks of all trades"—workers whose productivity is similar across different jobs in their labor market—declining search fri...

Front Matter

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

Journal of Economic Literature Editor search -- request for suggestions

[News]

August 27, 2021

View member announcement from August 27, 2021.

Call for Papers: The 4th Conference of Law & Macroeconomics

[News]

August 27, 2021

Submissions should be submitted by September 15, 2021.

Search Committee for Journal of Economic Literature Editor

[Page]

Front Matter

American Economic Review, September 2021

Inattention and Switching Costs as Sources of Inertia in Medicare Part D

By Florian Heiss, Daniel McFadden, Joachim Winter, Amelie Wuppermann, and Bo Zhou

American Economic Review, September 2021

Consumers' health plan choices are highly persistent even though optimal plans change over time. This paper separates two sources of inertia, inattention to plan choice and switching costs. We develop a panel data model with separate attention and choice ...

The Risk-Adjusted Carbon Price

By Ton S. van den Bremer and Frederick van der Ploeg

American Economic Review, September 2021

The social cost of carbon is the expected present value of damages from emitting one ton of carbon today. We use perturbation theory to derive an approximate tractable expression for this cost adjusted for climatic and economic risk. We allow for differen...