Locked in by Leverage: Job Search during the Housing Crisis

This paper examines how housing market distress affects job search. Using data from a leading online job search platform during the Great Recession, we find that job seekers in areas with depressed housing markets apply for fewer jobs that require relocation. With their search constrained geographically, job seekers broaden their search to lower level [...]

2024-02-01T15:54:34-07:00August 24th, 2020|

Land Regulations and the Optimal Distribution of Cities

Despite the large impact institutions have on the allocation of population, it remains an open question which institutions produce an efficient allocation of people across cities. Due to agglomeration, differences in amenities, and congestion, cities experience decreasing returns to population within cities (intensive margin) and across cities (extensive margin). This paper considers three institutional [...]

2021-02-16T12:45:33-07:00August 24th, 2020|

Sincere Voting in Large Elections

Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) showed that sincere voting is not typically an equilibrium of the Condorcet voting model when the electorate is large. Here, we reverse their finding by adding to the Condorcet model a third type of voter—one that receives no information in favor of either of the alternatives—as well as global uncertainty about the probability that [...]

2021-02-16T12:54:38-07:00August 24th, 2020|

Rethinking Strength in Numbers: Bilateral Bargaining in Groups

Many of the motivating examples and applications of non-cooperative bargaining involve groups bargaining against each other. However, much of the literature ignores the structures of profit sharing within the group. This structure determines the incentives for each player and there by determines the bargaining power of each group. We construct a model in which [...]

2021-02-16T12:54:27-07:00August 24th, 2020|

The Power of the Agenda Setter: A Dynamic Legislative Bargaining

We consider an infinitely repeated legislative bargaining game with three players who split a fixed surplus in every period. The status quo allocation evolves endogenously over time, as agents can approve new proposals by simple majority rule. One player is permanently endowed with veto power, and must approve any amendment to the status quo. [...]

2021-02-16T12:54:52-07:00August 24th, 2020|

The Impact of Investor-Level Taxation on Mergers and Acquisitions

Investor-level taxation may distort merger and acquisition decisions when capital gains are taxed at a preferable rate, relative to dividends. The intuition is that the value of a target’s assets depends on whether the target is acquired. If it is acquired, then the firm’s equity is taxed at the capital gains rate. If, instead, the [...]

2021-02-16T12:53:25-07:00August 24th, 2020|

Marijuana Taxation and Imperfect Competition

We investigate the tax implications for the new recreational marijuana industry in the United States, which reached a size of $9 billion in 2017. We exploit administrative data from Washington state to evaluate market conduct, and we estimate the elasticity of supply to be 1.46 . In addition, we conduct a survey of marijuana [...]

2021-02-16T12:53:13-07:00August 24th, 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, the authors find that these changes caused a significant increase in the turnover rate of the firm’s most productive employees. The response was relatively muted [...]

2023-09-28T10:24:43-06:00July 19th, 2020|