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- 2025
- Working Paper
Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution
By: Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau and Marco Tabellini
We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax—a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Tax Planning, Illiquidity, and Credit Risks: Evidence from DeFi Lending
By: Lisa De Simone, Peiyi Jin and Daniel Rabetti
This study establishes a plausible causal link between tax-planning-induced illiquidity and credit risks in lending markets. Exploiting an exogenous tax shock imposed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on cryptocurrency gains, along with millions of transactions in... View Details
- November 2024
- Article
Preference Externality Estimators: A Comparison of Border Approaches and IVs
By: Xi Ling, Wesley R. Hartmann and Tomomichi Amano
This paper compares two estimators—the Border Approach and an Instrumental Variable (IV) estimator—using a unified framework where identifying variation arises from “preference externalities,” following the intuition in Waldfogel (2003). We highlight two dimensions in... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Bank Capital and the Growth of Private Credit
By: Sergey Chernenko, Robert Ialenti and David Scharfstein
We show that business development companies (BDCs)—closed-end funds that provide a
significant share of nonbank loans to middle market firms—are very well capitalized according
to bank capital frameworks. They have median risk-based capital ratios of about 36%... View Details
- Winter–Spring 2024
- Article
Grand Bargain: Negotiating Toward a Better Middle East
How can sophisticated negotiation bring about a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East? While a "grand bargain" to accomplish this lofty goal may seem implausible, the potential value of such an agreement would be vast for most Israelis, Palestinians, and key... View Details
- Spring 2024
- Article
One Aspirational Future for India’s Higher Education Sector
By: Tarun Khanna
Several recent encouraging experiments in Indian higher education suggest a plausible aspirational path toward a more salubrious future than that suggested by an otherwise struggling system. Four case studies of privately conceived and funded universities each exhibit... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Half the Firms, Double the Profits: Public Firms' Transformation, 1996–2022
By: Mark J. Roe and Charles C.Y. Wang
The number of public firms in the United States has halved since the beginning of the twenty-first century, causing consternation among corporate and securities law regulators. The dominant explanations, often advanced by Securities and Exchange commissioners when... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Intermediary Balance Sheets and the Treasury Yield Curve
By: Wenxin Du, Benjamin Hebert and Wenhao Li
We document a regime change in the Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from net short to net long Treasury bonds. We construct “net-long” and “net-short” curves that account for balance sheet and financing costs, and show that actual... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Impact of Unionization on Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality: Evidence from Starbucks
By: Isamar Troncoso, Minkyung Kim, Ishita Chakraborty and SooHyun Kim
The US has seen a rise in union movements, but their effects on service industry marketing outcomes like customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality remain understudied. In this paper, we empirically study the impact on customer satisfaction and... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking
By: David S. Scharfstein and Antonio Falato
Using confidential supervisory risk ratings, we document that banks increase risk after they go public compared to a control group of banks that filed to go public but withdrew their filings for plausibly exogenous reasons. The increase in risk increases short-term... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Migration, Climate Similarity, and the Consequences of Climate Mismatch
By: Marguerite Obolensky, Marco Tabellini and Charles Taylor
This paper examines the concept of “climate matching” in migration—the idea that migrants seek out destinations with familiar climates. Focusing on the US, we document that temperature distance between origin and destination predicts the distribution of migrants across... View Details
Keywords: Migration; Climate; Immigration; Residency; Weather; Ethnicity; Climate Change; Geographic Location; Policy; United States
- August 2023
- Article
Anti-Corruption, Government Subsidies, and Innovation: Evidence from China
By: Lily Fang, Josh Lerner, Chaopeng Wu and Qi Zhang
We leverage an exogenous shock—the crackdown on corrupt Chinese officials beginning in 2012—and examine how the allocation of research subsidies and innovative outcomes were affected. We argue that the staggered removal of provincial heads on corruption charges during... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Effects of Inconsistent Work Schedules on Employee Lateness and Absenteeism
By: Caleb Kwon and Ananth Raman
Problem Definition: Employee lateness and absenteeism pose challenges for businesses, particularly in the retail industry, where punctuality is vital for optimal store operations and customer service. This paper relates employee lateness and absenteeism with... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Towards Robust Off-Policy Evaluation via Human Inputs
By: Harvineet Singh, Shalmali Joshi, Finale Doshi-Velez and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to undergo changes (that is, dataset... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Threat and Assimilation: Evidence from Refugees in Germany
By: Philipp Jaschke, Sulin Sardoschau and Marco Tabellini
This paper studies the effects of local threat on the cultural assimilation and economic integration of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We use representative survey data and... View Details
Keywords: Assimilation; Threat Hypothesis; Migration; Cultural Change; Refugees; Culture; Identity; Germany
- 2021
- Article
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details
- April 2021
- Article
Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson
An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Abhijit Chowdhury, Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, Reshmaan Hussam and Aakash Mohpal
Patient trust is an important driver of the demand for healthcare. But it may also impact supply:
doctors who realize that patients may not trust them may adjust their behavior in response. We
assemble a large dataset that assesses clinical performance using... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Vertical Integration of Healthcare Providers Increases Self-Referrals and Can Reduce Downstream Competition: The Case of Hospital-Owned Skilled Nursing Facilities
By: David Cutler, Leemore S. Dafny, David Grabowski, Steven S. Lee and Christopher Ody
The landscape of the U.S. healthcare industry is changing dramatically as healthcare providers expand both within and across markets. While federal antitrust agencies have mounted several challenges to same-market combinations, they have not challenged any... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details