In welfare economics, the theory of second best is inextricably linked to an article by Richard George Lipsey and Kelvin John Lancaster, published in 1956 in the Review of Economic Studies. The publication of this article was encouraged by Harry Gordon Johnson, who was a member of the journal's...

This paper uses a novel GPS-coded dataset for more than three million car trips in the four largest German cities to measure the efficiency losses from using uniform fuel taxes as a second-best optimal tax to reduce traffic congestion. We estimate the short-run price elasticity of...

We discuss reasons why traditional rural communities may be reluctant to voluntarily relinquish their access to land despite being compensated at market prices, thereby limiting the scope for reallocating land to more productive uses in agriculture or urban development. Owing to financial market...

We study clean energy subsidies in a quantitative climate-economy model. Clean energy subsidies decrease carbon emissions if and only if they lower the marginal product of dirty energy. The constrained-efficient subsidy equals the marginal external cost of dirty energy multiplied by the marginal...

We study clean energy subsidies in a quantitative climate-economy model. Clean en-ergy subsidies decrease carbon emissions if and only if they lower the marginal product of dirty energy. The constrained-efficient subsidy equals the marginal external cost of dirty energy multiplied by the...

The teacher labor market is a two-sided matching market where the effects of policies depend on the actions of both sides. We specify a matching model of teachers and schools that we estimate with rich data on teachers' applications and principals' ratings. Both teachers' and principals'...