Papers

We construct a publicly available atlas of children’s outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children’s earnings distributions, incarceration rates...

 

Investing in college carries high returns but comes with considerable risk. Financial products like equity contracts can mitigate this risk, yet college is typically financed through non-dischargeable, government-backed student loans. This paper argues...

This paper outlines the case for using the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) in empirical welfare analysis. It compares the MVPF approach with more traditional welfare metrics such as the Cost-Benefit Ratio and the Net Social Benefits criterion. It...

We examine the geographic incidence of local labor market growth across locations of childhood residence. We ask: when wages grow in a given US labor market, do the benefits flow to individuals growing up in nearby or distant locations? We begin by...

We estimate the returns to IRS audits of taxpayers across the income distribution. We find an additional $1 spent auditing taxpayers above the 90th income percentile yields more than $12 in revenue, while audits of below-median income taxpayers yield $5...

Low-income families in the United States tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. One potential explanation for this pattern is that low-income families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such...

Should choice be offered in social insurance programs? The paper presents a conceptual framework that identifies the key forces determining the value of offering choice, reviews some existing evidence on these forces, and aims to guide further empirical...

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...

 

This paper provides a method to measure the traditional Kaldor-Hicks notion of “economic efficiency” when taxes affect behavior. In contrast to traditional unweighted surplus, measuring efficiency requires weighting individual benefits (or surplus) by...

 

The willingness to pay for insurance captures the value of insurance against only the risk that remains when choices are observed. This paper develops tools to measure the ex-ante expected utility impact of insurance subsidies and...