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One of the most enduring political economy puzzles of the past 40 years in the United States is why so many ordinary Americans support tax cuts for the rich. This paper aims to unpack this puzzle by providing new experimental evidence on what drives Americans’ preferences for cutting the top rate of federal income tax.

This paper introduces a novel lens through which we can view and understand the world, which is compositional inequality. Compositional inequality describes differences between rich and poor in terms of the labour share and capital share of their income.

This paper asks what are the gaps in exposure between racial groups, and how have they evolved over time. It shows that the gap between the non-Hispanic white population and African Americans is narrowing over time, and investigates what is the specific contribution of the Clean Air Acts.‍

This paper investigates how individuals weight income gaps between themselves and others in particular positions in a societal income distribution. This is crucial to understand how individuals form their fairness considerations and preferences for redistribution, as we know that people care about inequality both in absolute and in relative terms.

This paper examines how tax incentives lower effective tax rates and how they vary with firm size. This is important because tax incentives generate a government revenue loss, can distort firms’ production, and may exacerbate inequality. We also use our estimates of effective tax rates to assess the potential impact of a Global Minimum Tax.

How has cross-border integration affected the relative taxation of labour and capital historically and globally? And which countries have been most affected by the erosion of effective capital taxation, and why? Answering these questions is critical to shed light on the macroeconomic effects and long-run social sustainability of globalisation.

This paper develops algorithms that recover existing national accounts aggregates from naturally occurring transaction data and produce novel measures, such as distributional national accounts for the different components of output.

This research estimates the effect of breastfeeding on child development: cognitive and socio-emotional, as well as health. Breastfeeding is just one of many ways in which mothers can influence their child’s development, and mothers who breastfeed may also be more or less likely to make other investments that affect their child’s development.

In the largest correspondence study conducted to date in the rental housing market, encompassing 50 major cities in the US, this paper documents patterns of discrimination across US regions, and explores relationships between discrimination, segregation, and economic opportunity.

The importance of siblings and the quality of their bond for children's development have not been sufficiently explored, even though most children have at least one sibling. Policy has instead focused on stimulating interactions between parents and the target child. Understanding the role of siblings in the human capital formation process can provide another policy tool to tackle inequality.