We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as county-level data and the...

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-family buildings can often consume both hot and cold water at zero marginal cost. Using...

Water is an increasingly scarce resource. It is often distributed such that consumers do not face any marginal cost of consumption, creating a common pool problem. For instance, tenants in multi-family buildings can often consume both hot and cold water at zero marginal cost. Using...

In Rawls' (1971) influential social contract approach to distributive justice, the fair income distribution is the one that an individual would choose behind a veil of ignorance. Harsanyi (1953, 1955, 1975) treats this situation as a decision under risk and arrives at utilitarianism using...

We investigate the effects of the rise of the Internet as an additional mass medium on news consumption patterns and political attitudes. We use Swedish survey data from 2002 to 2007, the period during which high-speed Internet (broadband) emerged. We find that broadband access is associated...

The implementation of a copyright protection reform in Sweden in April 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and punished for illegal file sharing. This paper investigates the impact of the reform on illegal file sharing and music sales using a difference-in-differences approach with...

This paper is about the nonparametric regression of a choice variable on a nonlinear budget set when there is general heterogeneity, i.e., in the random utility model (RUM). We show that utility maximization makes this a three-dimensional regression with piecewise linear, convex budget sets with...

This paper extends the nonparametric structural method to estimate labor supply developed by Blomquist and Newey (2002) to handle cases in which there are individuals who do not work. The method is then applied to married women in Sweden from 1973 to 1999. I find an uncompensated wage elasticity...

This paper is about the nonparametric regression of a choice variable on a nonlinear budget set under utility maximization with general heterogeneity, i.e. in the random utility model (RUM). We show that utility maximization and convex budget sets make this regression three dimensional with a...

We explore the implications of heterogeneity in the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) for tax-reform based estimation methods. We theoretically show that existing methods yield elasticities that are biased and lack policy relevance. We illustrate the empirical importance of our theoretical...