International Economic Review最新文献

Many economic allocation decisions involve subjective judgment. This judgment may be perceived as fair when needs are considered but may seem unjust in cases of personal-taste discrimination. In an experimental impartial-spectator design, we explore perceptions of taste-based inequality and compare them to attitudes toward inequalities grounded in objective procedures, namely, merit and luck. We find that while taste-based inequality is perceived distinctly, it is treated as unfair, similar to luck and unlike merit. Additionally, our work suggests that the perception of merit as more fair than luck is primarily driven by individuals with above-average income.

We specify and estimate a life-cycle model of consumption, housing demand, and labor supply in an environment where individuals can file for bankruptcy and/or default on their mortgages in the presence of house price shock, income shock, and catastrophic expenditure events. A key feature of the model is that individuals differ by education, which dictates their income process and preference. We estimate the model using data on credit reports and mortgages combined with Census data. Our model demonstrates that current bankruptcy and foreclosure laws have significant distributional impact. Specifically, Chapter 7 bankruptcy benefits low educated individuals but imposes large welfare costs on those with high education. Chapter 13 bankruptcy also benefits the low education group and affects the high education group little. Recourse laws, by contrast, are costly to low education groups, but beneficial to the high education group.

We analyze the implications of the decline in labor's share in national income for optimal Ramsey taxation. It is optimal to accompany the decline in labor share by raising capital taxes only if the labor share is falling because of a decline in competition or other mechanisms that raise the share of pure profits. This result holds under various alternative institutional arrangements that are relevant for optimal taxation of capital income. A quantitative application to the US economy shows that soaring profit shares since the 1980s can justify a significantly increasing path of capital income taxes.

In this paper, I introduce a novel benchmark in games, super-Nash performance, and a solution concept, optimin, whereby players maximize their minimal payoff under unilateral profitable deviations by other players. Optimin achieves super-Nash performance in that, for every Nash equilibrium, there exists an optimin where each player not only receives but also guarantees super-Nash payoffs under unilateral profitable deviations by others. Furthermore, optimin generalizes Nash equilibrium in $�n$-person constant-sum games and coincides with it when $��n�=�2�$. Finally, optimin is consistent with the direction of non-Nash deviations in games in which cooperation has been extensively studied.

We examine the initial postcollege geographic location decisions of students from low-income backgrounds, focusing on the role of nonpecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions, in the spirit of the contingent valuation approach, allow us to characterize the full nonpecuniary benefits of each relevant location in dollar equivalents. Supplementing data on perceived location choice probabilities and wage expectations with our nonpecuniary measures allows us to estimate a stylized location choice model and obtain a comprehensive understanding of the importance of pecuniary and nonpecuniary factors. We also combine the nonpecuniary measures with realized location and earnings outcomes to characterize inequality in overall welfare.