Houses and apartments sold in New York and New Jersey at prices above $1 million are subject to the so-called 1% “mansion tax" imposed on the full value of the transaction. This policy generates a discontinuity (a “notch") in the overall tax liability. We rely on this and other...

I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the last one hundred years. The three main approaches – Survey of Consumer Finances, estate tax multiplier techniques and capitalization method – generate generally consistent findings until...

We rely on the Master Beneficiary File to document a number of facts regarding claiming of Social Security benefits and quality of date of birth data in administrative files. We then assess the impact of changes in retirement incentives that have taken place since 2000 on claiming. We find...

Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the United States peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one-half and then declined to one-third. We argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth, with the share of women...

We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and may lead to time-inconsistent behavior and other "behavioral" phenomena. In the model, repression...