Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

The Internet as a Tax Haven?

By David R. Agrawal

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

If online transactions are tax free, increased online shopping may lower tax rates as jurisdictions seek to reduce tax avoidance; but, if online firms remit taxes, online sales may put upward pressure on tax rates because internet sales help enforce desti...

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 ...

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 ...

Local Protectionism, Market Structure, and Social Welfare: China's Automobile Market

By Panle Jia Barwick, Shengmao Cao, and Shanjun Li

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

This study documents the presence of local protectionism and quantifies its impacts on market competition and social welfare in the context of China's automobile market. A salient feature of China's auto market is that vehicle models by joint ventures a...

Corporate Taxation under Weak Enforcement

By Pierre Bachas and Mauricio Soto

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

How should developing countries tax corporate income? We study this question in Costa Rica, where firms face higher average tax rates on profits when revenues marginally increase. We combine discontinuity and bunching designs to estimate the elasticity of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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,...

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 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...

Russell Sage Foundation Opportunities

[News]

October 29, 2021

View upcoming opportunities from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Consumption Inequality and the Frequency of Purchases

By Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Dmitri Koustas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2021

We document a decline in the frequency of shopping trips in the United States since 1980 and consider its implications for the measurement of consumption inequality. A decline in shopping frequency as households stock up on storable goods (i.e., inventory...

Measuring consumption inequality

[Research Highlight]

October 21, 2021

Warehouse stores reduce the frequency of shopping trips.

References for Best Practices for Economists

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