A common objection to "sin taxes"--corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and sugary drinks--is that they often fall disproportionately on low-income consumers. This paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive motives...

In 1971 President Nixon declared war on cancer and increased the federal funds allocated to cancer research dramatically. Thirty years later, many have declared this war a failure. Overall cancer statistics confirm this view: age-adjusted mortality in 2000 was essentially unchanged from the...

Older wealthholders spend down assets much more slowly than predicted by classic life-cycle models. This paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model in which preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care (LTC), and ordinary consumption combine with health and...

This paper presents a model of the intergenerational transmission of education and marital sorting where parents matter both because of their household income and because parental human capital determines the expected value of a child's disutility from making an effort to become skilled. We show...

The theory of international macroeconomics shows that domestic tax policy in a global economy affects foreign economic conditions via complex, dynamic interactions through relative prices, tax revenues, and wealth distribution. This paper proposes a tractable quantitative framework for assessing...

A decade has passed since Robert Lucas asked why capital does not flow from rich to poor countries. Lucas used a contemporary example to illustrate his Paradox, the very modest flow of capital from the United States to India during the second great global capital market boom, after 1970. Had he...

Recent trade and wages literature focuses on whether trade or technology has been the major source of increases in wage inequality in OECD countries since the 1980s. In this literature, no attention has been paid to demand side considerations. Using a simple heterogeneous goods trade model of...

Although the college-high school wage gap for younger men has doubled over the past 30 years, the gap for older men has remained nearly constant. We argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly-educated workers across age groups. Cohorts born in the first half of the...

We investigate the Expectations Hypotheses of the term structure of interest rates and of the foreign exchange market using vector autoregressive methods for the U.S. dollar, Deutsche mark, and British pound interest rates and exchange rates. In addition to standard Wald tests, we formulate...

This paper analyzes the effects of the legal rules governing transnational bankruptcies. We compare a regime of territoriality' -- in which assets are adjudicated by the jurisdiction in which they are located at the time of the bankruptcy -- with a regime of universality are adjudicated in a...