From page 71 of Daniel Marcin’s “The Revenue Act of 1924: Publicity, Tax Cuts, Response”     ..read more

Here is an interesting article that my very talented research assistant Francesco Ruggieri co-authored with Cerrato and Ferrara on the impact of (Autor Dorn Hanson) trade shocks on county vote shares ..read more

From Gelber, Isen, and Song: We estimate the effect of pension income on earnings by examining the Social Security Notch, which cut lifetime discounted Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) benefts by over $6,100 on average for individuals born in 1917 relative to those born in 1916. Using Social Security Administration microdata on the U.S. population by day of birth and a regression discontinuity design, we document that the Notch caused a large increase in elderly earnings. The point estimates show that a $1 increase in OASI benefits causes earnings in the elderly years to decrease by 46 ..read more

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Here is a new article from Chicago Booth Review that is worth a read ..read more

See here for details ..read more

See here for details ..read more

From Redding and Rossi-Hansberg: The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until recently, the theoretical literature on economic geography had focused on styl- ized settings that could not easily be taken to the data. This paper reviews more recent research that has developed quantitative models of economic geography. These models are rich enough to speak to first-order features of the data, such as many heterogenous locations ..read more

From the NYTIMES: Mossack Fonseca employees were named as the companies’ officers, avoiding whenever possible any link to the Ponsoldt family. The firm even asked a Hong Kong branch of Barclays, the international bank, to override its rules for proof of the so-called beneficial owners of the accounts. “This is a very special client of ours,” a Mossack Fonseca lawyer wrote, conceding that the firm had intentionally created such a maze of companies so it “leaves us in the position to legally argue that our client is NOT the owner of the structure.” It was not clear if the bank complied. I ..read more

From David Card, Ana Rute Cardoso, Joerg Heining, and Patrick Kline: We review the literature on firm-level drivers of labor market inequality. There is strong evidence from a variety of fields that standard measures of productivity – like output per worker or total factor productivity – vary substantially across firms, even within narrowly-defined industries. Several recent studies note that rising trends in the dispersion of productivity across firms mirror the trends in the wage inequality across workers. Two distinct literatures have searched for a more direct link between these two ..read more