The Direct Effect of Taxes and Transfers on Changes in the U.S. Income Distribution, 1967–2015
Scholars have increasingly drawn attention to rising levels of income inequality in the United States.
Research
Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020: Reversals of Fortune
Previous Poverty and Shared Prosperity Reports have conveyed the difficult message that the world is not on track to meet the global goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030.
Hospital Allocation and Racial Disparities in Health Care
We develop a simple framework to measure the role of hospital allocation in racial disparities in health care and use it to study Black and white Medicare patients who are treated for heart attacks –
Lynching and Local Justice: Legitimacy and Accountability in Weak States
What are the social and political consequences of poor state governance and low state legitimacy?
The Effects of Police Violence on Inner-City Students
Nearly a thousand officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States.
Helping Homeowners During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons from the Great Recession
The Covid-19 public health crisis has sharply reduced the earnings of millions of U.S. households, following the severe curtailment of economic activity needed to contain the spread of the virus.
Presidential Address: Aspirations, Social Norms, and Development
I study the role of aspirations in economic development drawing on the existing theoretical and empirical literature and provide some new empirical findings using individual level data on aspirations
State Capabilities for Problem-Oriented Governance
Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing the power of problem-oriented governance as a way to address complex public problems.
The Intergenerational Effects of Parental Incarceration
We estimate the causal effects of parental incarceration on children’s short- and long-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden.
Targeted Debt Relief and the Origins of Financial Distress: Experimental Evidence from Distressed Credit Card Borrowers
We study the drivers of financial distress using a large-scale field experiment that offered randomly selected borrowers a combination of (i) immediate payment reductions to target short- run liquidit
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