Consumer Protection in Auto Lending
Jen Brown and Mark Jansen , 2020. In a study that examines the impact of consumer protection laws on loan terms and outcomes in auto financing, the authors find that while laws prohibiting wage garnishment benefit borrowers who default, borrowers who pay their debt in full face higher total observable loan costs where wage garnishment is prohibited. [download pdf]
Crossing the District Line: Border Mismatch and Targeted Redistribution
Allison Stashko, 2020. Using a probabilistic voting model in which parties compete to win legislative districts but can only allocate resources at the county level, the author shows that a mismatch in electoral district borders and local government borders—which occurs in every U.S. state—distorts the distribution of public funds. [download pdf]
Assessment Caps and the Racial Assessment Gap
Troup Howard and Carlos Avenancio-Leon, 2022. We show that legislative caps on assessment growth are associated with reduced racial inequality in property taxation. These reductions increase in treatment intensity and are largest in high minority neighborhoods and low-income neighborhoods, which prior work shows are more susceptible to assessment misvaluations. [download pdf]
Do Police Maximize Arrests or Minimize Crime? Evidence from Racial Profiling in the U.S.
Allison Stashko, 2020. In a study that aims to identify the type of discrimination driving racial profiling in police stops, the author solves two models of racial profiling and finds evidence that police officers search for illegal activity in order to maximize arrests, not to minimize crime. [download the pdf]
May 2023
Consumer Protection in Auto Lending
Jen Brown and Mark Jansen , 2020. In a study that examines the impact of consumer protection laws on loan terms and outcomes in auto financing, the authors find that while [...]
March 2023
Crossing the District Line: Border Mismatch and Targeted Redistribution
Allison Stashko, 2020. Using a probabilistic voting model in which parties compete to win legislative districts but can only allocate resources at the county level, the author shows that a mismatch [...]
October 2022
Assessment Caps and the Racial Assessment Gap
Troup Howard and Carlos Avenancio-Leon, 2022. We show that legislative caps on assessment growth are associated with reduced racial inequality in property taxation. These reductions increase in treatment intensity and are [...]
May 2022
Do Police Maximize Arrests or Minimize Crime? Evidence from Racial Profiling in the U.S.
Allison Stashko, 2020. In a study that aims to identify the type of discrimination driving racial profiling in police stops, the author solves two models of racial profiling and finds evidence [...]
February 2022
The Consequences of Student Loan Credit Expansions: Evidence from Three Decades of Default Cycles
Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis, 2021. This paper studies the link between credit availability and student loan repayment using administrative federal student loan data. We demonstrate that policy-driven changes in credit [...]
November 2021
Probability-Based Estimates of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Seroprevalence and Detection Fraction, Utah, United States
Adam Looney, Matthew Samore, Steven Alder, Andrew T. Pavia, Nathan Seegert, Maclean Gaulin, Brian Orleans, Kristina Stratford, and Mu-Jeung Yang, 2021. We aimed to generate an unbiased estimate of the [...]
High variability in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 within households and implications for control
Adam Looney, Damon J.A. Toth, Alexander B. Beams, Lindsay T. Keegan, Yue Zhang, Tom Greene, Brian Orleans, Nathan Seegert, Stephen C. Alder, and Matthew H. Samore, 2021. Severe acute respiratory [...]
September 2021
Working for Your Bread: The Labor Supply Effects of SNAP
Jason Cook, 2021. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the only universal component of the US safety net. In 2019, the government spent over 60 billion dollars to provide nutrition [...]
August 2021
How Do Private Firms Respond to Corporate Taxes?
Elena Patel, Jeffrey Coles, Nathan Seegert, and Matthew Smith, 2018. In a study that uses a large, newly-available administrative dataset on U.S. corporate tax filings, the authors find that U.S. firms are more [...]
June 2021
Dynamic Patterns of Loss Use and Effective Tax Rates: Owners of S-Corporations
Elena Patel, Lucas Goodman, and Molly Saunders-Scott, 2021. In this paper, we study tax loss asymmetry for S corporate owners. These owners use most losses contemporaneously, reducing the tax asymmetry [...]
April 2021
Prosecutor Elections and Police Accountability
Allison Stashko and Haritz Garro, 2021. Prosecutors play an important role in holding police accountable by determining whether or not an officer has broken the law. At the same time, prosecutors [...]
December 2020
Middle-Class Redistribution: Tax and Transfer Policy for Most Americans
Adam Looney, Jeff Larrimore, and David Splinter. In Melissa S. Kearney and Amy Ganz (eds.), 2020. The “middle class” has benefitted from government redistribution in recent decades. For individuals in non-elderly [...]
September 2020
Half Banked: The Economic Impact of Cash Management in the Marijuana Industry
Nathan Seegert and Elizabeth Berger, 2020. Studying marijuana sales data in Washington state—where only half of all marijuana businesses have access to cash management services and none have access to lending [...]
Workplace Knowledge Flows
Nathan Seegert, Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma and Christopher Stanton, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020. Results from a field experiment suggest simple management practices encouraging workers to ask peers about their own [...]
Marijuana Taxation and Imperfect Competition
Nathan Seegert, Elena Patel and Christopher Mace, National Tax Journal, 2020. Using administrative data from Washington state to study the recreational marijuana industry, the authors determine that in perfectly competitive markets, marijuana producers [...]
Applied Game Theory
Adam Meirowitz and Kristopher Ramsay, Handbook of Political Science, Sage Press, 2020. In this chapter in The SAGE Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations, the authors put forward a [...]
August 2020
Better Bunching, Nicer Notching
Nathan Seegert, Marinho Bertanha, and Andrew McCallum, 2019. The authors study the bunching identification strategy for an elasticity parameter that. [download pdf]
July 2020
Employee Responses to Compensation Changes
Nathan Seegert, Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, and Christopher Stanton, 2020. In a study of employee responses to compensation changes that ultimately reduced take-home pay by 7% for the average affected worker, [...]
May 2020
Rethinking Strength in Numbers: Bilateral Bargaining in Groups
Ravideep Sethi, and WonSeok Yoo, 2020. Constructing a model in which two groups of individuals are engaged in alternate offer bargaining, the authors find that, counter to common intuition, the smaller [...]
April 2020
How to Fix Federal Student Loan Programs; and Fix the System, Don’t Throw it Out
Adam Looney and Constantine Yanellis, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2020. In a Point/Counterpoint exchange in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the authors argue that the government should repair [...]
February 2020
Rent-Seeking through Collective Bargaining: Teachers Unions and Education Production
Jason Cook, Stéphane Lavertu, and Corbin Miller, 2020. We estimate the effect of Ohio teachers unions on education production by comparing the outcomes of districts that allocated new tax revenue in [...]
January 2020
Is There Still Son Preference in the United States?
Jason Cook, Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn, Peter Brummund, and Miriam Larson-Koester, 2020. In this paper, we use 2008–2013 American Community Survey data to update and further probe evidence on [...]
Government Privatization and Political Participation: The Case of Charter Schools
Jason Cook, Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu, and Zachary Peskowitz, 2020. Governments around the world have privatized public services in the name of efficiency and citizen empowerment, but some argue that privatization [...]
November 2019
The Power of the Agenda Setter: A Dynamic Legislative Bargaining
Ravideep Sethi and Ewout Verriest, 2019. Considering an infinitely repeated legislative bargaining game with three players, the authors show that a sufficiently patient and powerful veto player (for example a monarch [...]
September 2019
General Business Credits: Estimating the Impact of a Regime Change in Mandatory Tax Disclosure
Nathan Seegert, Laura Konda, and Elena Patel, 2019. In a study that documents the effect of the 2011 redesign of IRS Form 3800, the authors find that while the redesign was successful [...]