Health expenditures as a share of GDP in the United States have more than tripled over the past half-century. A common conjecture is that this is a consequence of rising income. We investigate this hypothesis by instrumenting for local area income with time series variation in oil prices interacted with local oil reserves. This strategy enables us to capture both partial equilibrium and local g...

In this paper we examine the effect of the income tax on charitable giving. An important challenge in this literature has been to estimate the long-run response of giving to a persistent change in tax-price, which can be difficult to distinguish from intertemporal substitution arising from differences between current and expected future tax prices, arising for example due to transitory fluctuat...

Health expenditures as a share of GDP in the United States have more than tripled over the past half-century. A common conjecture is that this is a consequence of rising income. We investigate this hypothesis by instrumenting for local area income with time series variation in oil prices interacted with local oil reserves. This strategy enables us to capture both partial equilibrium and local g...

The Transformation of Hunger Revisited We examine Trevon Logan’s 2009 claim to have found low levels of nutrition among British worker’s households in the late 19 century. Using the same data, we conclude that Logan’s estimates are thirty percent too low. Logan buttressed his estimates by claiming that the income elasticity of calories demand was unusually high among these households, relative ...

Using panel data information from The WLA Global Lottery Data Compendium this paper estimates aggregate demand functions for lottery tickets in order to examine variation the income elasticity of worldwide. analysis uses a quantile regression approach. estimated elasticities are compared across quartiles and world regions. results provide evidence that significant both geographic areas distribu...

Abstract The elasticity of taxable income is a key parameter in tax policy analysis. To examine the large variation found literature and broad elasticities, I conduct comprehensive meta-regression analysis using information from 61 studies containing 1,720 estimates. My findings reveal that estimated elasticities are not immutable parameters. They correlated with contextual factors choice empir...