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Working Paper
Interpreting life-cycle inequality patterns as an efficient allocation: mission impossible?
Data on consumption, earnings, wages and hours dispersion over the life cycle is commonly viewed as incompatible with a Pareto efficient allocation. We show that a model with preference and wage shocks and full insurance produces the rise in consumption, wages and hours dispersion over the life cycle found in U.S. data. The efficient allocation model requires an increasing preference shifter dispersion profile to account for an increasing consumption dispersion profile. We examine U.S. data and find support for the view that the dispersion in preference shifters increases with age.
Working Paper
Taxing top earners: a human capital perspective
We assess the consequences of substantially increasing the marginal tax rate on U.S. top earners using a human capital model. The top of the model Laffer curve occurs at a 53 percent top tax rate. Tax revenues and the tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve are smaller compared to an otherwise similar model that ignores the possibility of skill change in response to a tax reform. We also show that if one applies the methods used by Diamond and Saez (2011) to provide quantitative guidance for setting the tax rate on top earners to model data then the resulting tax rate exceeds the tax rate at ...
Journal Article
Higher taxes for top earners: can they really increase revenue?
Working Paper
Decomposing the gender wage gap with sample selection adjustment: evidence from Colombia
Despite the remarkable improvement of female labor market characteristics, a sizeable gender wage gap exists in Colombia. We employ quantile regression techniques to examine the degree to which current small differences in the distribution of observable characteristics can explain the gender gap. We find that the gap is largely explained by gender differences in the rewards to labor market characteristics and not by differences in the distribution of characteristics. We claim that Colombian women experience both a ?glass ceiling effect?? and also (what we call) a ?quicksand floor effect? ...
Journal Article
Representative neighborhoods of the United States
Many metropolitan areas in the United States display substantial racial segregation and substantial variation in incomes and house prices across neighborhoods. To what extent can this variation be summarized by a small number of representative (or synthetic) neighborhoods? To answer this question, U.S. neighborhoods are classified according to their characteristics in the year 2000 using a clustering algorithm. The author finds that such classification can account for 37 percent of the variation with two representative neighborhoods and for up to 52 percent with three representative ...
Journal Article
Oil Prices: Is Supply or Demand Behind the Slump?
A standard decomposition suggests the role of oil supply (understood as the current physical availability of crude) has been small.
Journal Article
Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts
We provide a common set of life cycle earnings statistics based on administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and Sweden. We find three qualitative patterns, which are common across countries. First, top-earnings inequality increases over the working lifetime. Second, the extreme right tail of the earnings distribution becomes thicker with age over the working lifetime. Third, top lifetime earners exhibit dramatic earnings growth over their working lifetime. Models of top earners should account for these three patterns and, importantly, for how they quantitatively differ ...