Intertemporal Altruism

By Felix Chopra, Armin Falk, and Thomas Graeber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2024

Most prosocial decisions involve intertemporal trade-offs. Yet, the timing of prosocial utility flows is ambiguous and bypassed by most models of other-regarding preferences. We study the behavioral implications of the time structure of prosocial utility,...

Autocracies in the information age

[Research Highlight]

July 07, 2020

UCLA professor Daniel Treisman discusses how today’s dictators retain their power and how to fight back.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

Behavioral Responses to State Income Taxation of High Earners: Evidence from California

By Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

Using administrative data, we analyze the response to Proposition 30, a 2012 measure that increased California marginal tax rates by up to 3 percentage points for high-income households. Relative to baseline departure rates, an additional 0.8 percent of t...

Hassle Costs versus Information: How Do Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Reduce Opioid Prescribing?

By Abby Alpert, Sarah Dykstra, and Mireille Jacobson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We study hassle costs versus information provision in explaining how prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) decrease opioid prescribing. PDMPs aim to reduce opioid prescribing through information provision but may also unintentionally affect prescr...

Fighting Crime in Lawless Areas: Evidence from Slums in Rio de Janeiro

By Christophe Bellégo and Joeffrey Drouard

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We use Rio de Janeiro's slum pacification program initiated in 2008 to analyze the effect of policies targeting crime in lawless areas. We correct the bias from the unobserved rise in crime reporting via the use of a proxy variable and bounded variation a...

Does Health Care Consolidation Harm Patients? Evidence from Maternity Ward Closures

By Daniel Avdic, Petter Lundborg, and Johan Vikström

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We study how closures of maternity wards affect maternal and neonatal health. Using data on all hospital births in Sweden between 1990 and 2004, we compare changes in birth-related outcomes across hospital catchment areas that were differently exposed to ...

Attendance Boundary Policies and the Limits to Combating School Segregation

By Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen and Mikkel Høst Gandil

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

What is the efficacy of redrawing school attendance boundaries as a desegregation policy? To provide causal evidence on this question, we employ novel data with unprecedented detail on the universe of Danish children and exploit changes in attendance boun...

Labor Supply Responses to Income Taxation among Older Couples: Evidence from a Canadian Reform

By Derek Messacar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

I assess whether the tax code is a viable policy lever for influencing labor supply among older workers. Specifically, using administrative data from Canada, I estimate the earnings responses to a unique reform that lowered tax burdens for couples with a ...

Increasing the Retirement Age: Policy Effects and Underlying Mechanisms

By Simon Rabaté, Egbert Jongen, and Tilbe Atav

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We study the effects of increasing the statutory retirement age (SRA) in the Netherlands, using regression discontinuity design and administrative data on the universe of the population. We find clear and large employment effects of the reform. A simple m...

The Impact of Improving Access to Support Services for Victims of Domestic Violence on Demand for Services and Victim Outcomes

By Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner, Jesse Matheson, and Réka Plugor

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We conducted a randomized controlled trial of an intervention designed to assist victims of domestic violence in accessing nonpolice support services. The intervention led to a 22 percent decrease in the fraction of victims providing a witness statement t...

Regulating Privacy Online: An Economic Evaluation of the GDPR

By Samuel G. Goldberg, Garrett A. Johnson, and Scott K. Shriver

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

Modern websites rely on personal data to design better content and to market themselves. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was intended to make access to such personal data more difficult, with the goal of protecting user priv...

The Introduction of the Income Tax, Fiscal Capacity, and Migration: Evidence from US States

By Traviss Cassidy, Mark Dincecco, and Ugo Antonio Troiano

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We evaluate how fiscal capacity and migration respond to the introduction of the individual income tax, drawing on new panel data on US states from 1900 to 2010. We find that the introduction of the income tax increased revenue per capita by 12 percent in...

Addressing Environmental Justice through In-Kind Court Settlements

By Pamela Campa and Lucija Muehlenbachs

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

In US environmental court cases, a cash penalty can be mitigated if a defendant volunteers to undertake an in-kind project, such as retrofitting school buses or building a public park. A goal of the policy is to address environmental justice concerns for ...

State Taxation of Nonresident Income and the Location of Work

By David R. Agrawal and Kenneth Tester

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

Prior studies show that taxes matter for the residential locations of high-income earners. But states raise a significant share of revenue from nonresidents. Using variation in state tax rates, we provide causal evidence on the effect of the net-of-tax ra...

Corporate Taxation and Evasion Responses: Evidence from a Minimum Tax in Honduras

By Felipe Lobel, Thiago Scot, and Pedro Zúniga

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We study corporate responses to a minimum income tax, using the universe of corporate tax filings in Honduras. The policy design allows us to separately estimate cost misreporting under profit taxation and the elasticity of reported revenue. Large corpora...

Mandatory Retirement for Judges Improved the Performance of US State Supreme Courts

By Elliott Ash and W. Bentley MacLeod

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

This paper provides evidence on how mandatory retirement influences judge performance using reforms in US state supreme courts as a natural experiment. We find that introducing mandatory retirement improves court performance as measured by output (number ...

Local Retail Prices, Product Variety, and Neighborhood Change

By Fernando Borraz, Felipe Carozzi, Nicolás González- Pampillón, and Leandro Zipitría

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-based tax exemption in the city of Mo...

Data and Code Availability Policy

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It is the policy of the American Economic Association to publish papers only if the data and code used in the analysis are clearly and precisely documented and access to the data and code is non-exclusive to the authors.