How Taxing Is Tax Filing? Using Revealed Preferences to Estimate Compliance Costs

By Youssef Benzarti

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

This paper uses a quasi-experimental design to estimate the cost of filing taxes. Using US tax returns, I observe how taxpayers choose between itemizing deductions and claiming the standard deduction. Taxpayers forgo large tax savings to avoid compliance ...

Optimal Income Taxation with Present Bias

By Benjamin B. Lockwood

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Work often entails up-front effort costs in exchange for delayed benefits, and mounting evidence documents present bias over effort in the face of such delays. This paper studies the implications for the optimal income tax. Optimal tax rates are computed ...

Decompositions and Policy Consequences of an Extraordinary Decline in Air Pollution from Electricity Generation

By Stephen P. Holland, Erin T. Mansur, Nicholas Z. Muller, and Andrew J. Yates

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2020

Using integrated assessment models, we calculate the economic value of the extraordinary decline in emissions from US power plants. Annual local and global air pollution damages fell from 245 to 133 billion USD over 2010–2017. Decomposition shows change...

How Democrats lost the South

[Research Highlight]

October 16, 2018

The AEA interviews Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington about why Southern states turned Republican in the 1960s.

Voter Turnout with Peer Punishment

By David K. Levine and Andrea Mattozzi

American Economic Review, October 2020

We introduce a model where social norms of voting participation are strategically chosen by competing political parties and determine voters' turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcemen...

Friends don’t let friends not vote

[Research Highlight]

October 26, 2020

How is turnout affected by excuses for not casting a ballot?

Assistant Professor in Political Economy Theory

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Assistant Professor in Microeconomic Theory

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Assessing the quality of start-ups

[Page]

Economists are going beyond standard ways of judging the health of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

AASLE 2020 Job Market Event

[News]

November 05, 2020

The event will be held on December 10-11, 2020.

Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Epidemiology's Time of Need: COVID-19 Calls for Epidemic-Related Economics

[Symposium: Economics and Epidemiology]

By Eleanor J. Murray

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted scientific conversations and scientific divisions into the public consciousness. Epidemiology and economics have long operated in distinct silos, but the COVID-19 pandemic presents a complex and cross-disciplinary prob...

A 30-Year Perspective on Property Derivatives: What Can Be Done to Tame Property Price Risk?

By Frank J. Fabozzi, Robert J. Shiller, and Radu S. Tunaru

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

The housing sector is the largest spot market in the world without a developed derivative contract to serve the risk management needs of market participants. This paper describes the evolution within a wider economic context of property derivatives in the...

Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference

By Amy Finkelstein and Nathaniel Hendren

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

We describe a framework for empirical welfare analysis that uses the causal estimates of a policy's impact on net government spending. This framework provides guidance for which causal effects are (and are not) needed for empirical welfare analysis of pub...

The Persistent Effects of Initial Labor Market Conditions for Young Adults and Their Sources

By Till von Wachter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Unlucky young workers entering the labor market in recessions suffer a range of medium- to long-term consequences. This paper summarizes the findings of the growing empirical literature on this subject and uses it to assess economic models of career devel...

Retrospectives: Regulating Banks versus Managing Liquidity: Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton in 1802

By John Berdell and Thomas Mondschean

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

At nearly the same moment, Jeremy Bentham and Henry Thornton adopted diametrically opposed approaches to stabilizing the financial system. Henry Thornton eloquently defended the Bank of England's actions as the lender of last resort and saw its discreti...

Recommendations for Further Reading

By Timothy Taylor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Business Incomes at the Top

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

Business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. We discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners, with the focus on clos...

The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use th...

Growing Income Inequality in the United States and Other Advanced Economies

[Symposium: How Much Income and Wealth Inequality?]

By Florian Hoffmann, David S. Lee, and Thomas Lemieux

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2020

This paper studies the contribution of both labor and non-labor income in the growth in income inequality in the United States and large European economies. The paper first shows that the capital to labor income ratio disproportionately increased among ...