This paper attempts to address two long standing questions in Public Finance: (i) why is the property tax, despite popular complaints about its fairness, the almost exclusive tax instrument used by local governments, and (ii) why do we consistently observe higher levels of governments undermine...

This paper presents a theoretical study of the e¤ects of globalization on risk sharing and welfare. We model globalization as a gradual and exogenous increase in the fraction of goods that are tradable. In the absence of frictions, globalization opens new goods markets and raises welfare. We...

I use data from the 1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey as well as other sources to measure the distributional impact of green tax reforms and consumption tax reforms using both annual income and lifetime income approaches to rank households. A modest tax reform in which environmental taxes equal...

New Keynesian models and some models of growth rely on market power for their results. This sole focus on market power as the source for certain macroeconomic phenomena is misguided both theoretically and empirically. New Keynesian multipliers are closely related to standard measures of...

We propose a method to measure the welfare cost of economic fluctuations that does not require full specification of consumer preferences and instead uses asset prices. The method is based on the marginal cost of consumption fluctuations, the per unit benefit of a marginal reduction in...

In a static setup, migration of unskilled labor may be resisted by the entire native-born population because, being relatively low earners, migrants are net beneficiaries of the fiscal system. However, the paper shows that with a pay-as-you-go pension, an important pillar of the welfare state,...

We study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks when agents learn from nominal prices. While public releases have the benefit of providing new information, they can have the cost of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system. We show that,...

We analyze a model in which firms are able to acquire information about product risks and may or may not be required to disclose this information. We initially study the effect of disclosure rules assuming that firms are not liable for the harm caused by their products. Although mandatory...

For decades, economists have used the hedonic model to estimate demands for the implicit characteristics of differentiated commodities. The traditional cross-sectional approach can recover marginal willingness to pay for characteristics, but has faltered over a difficult endogeneity problem for...