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 available to high-default institutions explain almost all of the historical time-series variation in defaults. [download pdf]
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 incidence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in 4 urban counties in Utah, USA. [download pdf]
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 syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) poses a high risk of transmission in close-contact indoor settings, which may include households. Prior studies have found a wide range of household secondary attack rates [...]
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 benefits to more than 36 million Americans. [download pdf]
September 2019
Best of the Corporate Bunch
Elena Patel, Jim Hines, Nathan Seegert, and Matthew Smith, 2019. Using new methods to study the universe of c-corporations in the U.S., the authors find evidence that corporations are much more [...]
The Optimal Distribution of Population Across Cities
Nathat Seegert, David Albouy, Kristian Behrens, and Frédéric Robert-Nicoud, 2019. Using a spatial urban model to study optimal city size, the authors determine that in equilibrium the largest cities on the [...]
How to close the loopholes in the Craft Beverage Modernization Act
Adam Looney, 2019. The author examines a legislative effort to extend the temporary tax cuts on wine, beer, and liquor included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and argues [...]
Optimal Differentiation through Step-wise Learning
Ravideep Sethi, 2020. Using a model that could apply to candidates seeking votes or to a product design team seeking to optimize sales, the author finds that the optimal policy platform [...]
August 2019
Career Concerns with Cost Uncertainty
Ravideep Sethi, 2020. In a model that studies worker ability and conscientiousness (cost of effort) over time, the author shows that during the agent’s early career, effort is a higher [...]
June 2019
Used and Not Lost: Examining Dynamic Patterns of S-Corporation Loss Use.
Elena Patel, Lucas Goodman, and Molly Saunders-Scott, 2019. The authors contribute to an important and growing literature examining the behavior of passthrough business owners by using administrative tax data to investigate [...]
Optimal Tax Policy Under Uncertainty Over Tax Revenues
Nathan Seegert, 2019. The author develops an excessive risk index to quantify the amount of unnecessary risk governments accept when writing tax policy among uncertainty in private and public consumption. The [...]
April 2019
Should Congestion Tolls be Set by the Government or by the Private Sector? The Knight–Pigou Debate Revisited
Nathan Seegert, and Stephen Salant, 2019. 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 sensitive to [...]
The Impact of Investor-level Taxation on Mergers and Acquisitions
Nathan Seegert and Eric Ohrn, 2019.In a study that examines the impact of shareholder taxation on the quality of mergers and acquisitions, the authors demonstrate how investor-level taxes can create a [...]
September 2018
The Long and the Short of It: Do Public and Private Firms Invest Differently?
Elena Patel, Naomi Feldman, Laura Kawano, Nirupama Rao, Michael Stevens and Jesse Edgerton, 2018. Using data from U.S. corporate tax returns, the authors find robust evidence that public firms invest more [...]
The Performance of State Tax Portfolios During and After the Great Recession
Nathan Seegert, 2018. The author finds that 18 states have increased the riskiness of their tax portfolio since the Great Recession, while only five decreased the riskiness of their tax portfolio. [...]
May 2018
Examining S-Corporation Losses and How They Are Used
Elena Patel, Katherine Lim, and Molly Saunders-Scott, 2018. In a presentation prepared for the National Tax Association 2018 Spring Symposium, the authors examine changes to the tax treatment of S-corporation losses [...]
September 2017
Does Market Power Encourage or Discourage Investment? Evidence from the Hospital Industry
Elena Patel and Nathan Seegert, 2017. The authors study an investment tax shock on U.S. hospitals and find that hospitals in concentrated markets increased investment by 5.0% ($2.1 million) more in [...]
June 2017
Abuse of tax deductions for charitable donations of conservation lands are on the rise
Adam Looney, 2017. The author finds that abuse of a tax deduction intended to encourage conservation of environmentally important land and historic buildings has cost the government billions of dollars of [...]
May 2017
9 Facts about Pass-through Businesses
Adam Looney and Aaron Krupkion, 2017. To help understand the policy considerations surrounding the taxation of pass-through businesses and the implications of potential reforms, the authors present nine facts about pass-throughs and [...]
April 2017
A Risk Sharing Proposal for Student Loans
Adam Looney, Tiffany Chou, and Tara Watson, 2017. To align incentives of higher education institutions with their student loan borrowers and taxpayers, the authors propose an institutional accountability system in which [...]
February 2017
Measuring Loan Outcomes at Postsecondary Institutions: Cohort Repayment Rates as an Indicator of Student Success and Institutional Accountability
Adam Looney, Tiffany Chou , and Tara Watson, 2017. The authors identify a particular metric of institutional loan performance, the cohort repayment rate (i.e. a measure of how much of their [...]
January 2017
The Rise of Alternative Work Arrangements: Evidence and Implications for Tax Filing and Benefit Coverage
Adam Looney, Emilie Jackson, and Shanthi Ramnath, 2017. In this paper, the authors draw on administrative tax records to provide a more complete picture of the growing number of American workers [...]
What Would a Cash Flow Tax Look Like? Historical Panel Lessons
Elena Patel, 2017. In this article, the authors present a prototype destination basis cash flow tax to replace the existing corporate income tax. The authors suggest this reform could bolster the [...]
November 2016
Gender, Competition and Choices in Higher Education
Jen Brown and Anne Boring, 2016. In a study of students at a selective French university competing for spots in foreign universities to fulfill a mandatory requirement, the authors find that [...]
August 2016
Peer Information and Risk Taking under Competitive and Non-competitive Pay Schemes
Jen Brown, Dimitry Ryvkin and Philip Brookins, 2017. In a study of how pay incentive schemes affect employees’ job performance, the authors find that when no peer information is available, relative [...]
August 2015
Misconduct in Financial Services: Differences across Organizations
Jen Brown and Dylan Minor, 2017. Using sales complaint data for insurance agents, the authors find that agents working exclusively for large branded firms are more likely to be the subject [...]
March 2015
Sincere Voting in Large Elections
Adam Meirowitz and Avidit Acharya, 2015. In a paper that re-examines the discrepancy between sincere and strategic voting in the seminal Condorcet model, the authors introduce a third type of [...]
October 2013
Dispute Resolution Institutions and Strategic Militarization
Adam Meirowitz, Massimo Morelli, Kristopher Ramsay, Francesco Squintani, 2019. The authors study a model that emphasizes the role that third-party mediators can play in effectively brokering peace and minimizing militarization during [...]