Research and analysis

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who are most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and show that soda taxes are relatively effective at targeting the sugar intake of the young, are less successful at targeting the intake of those with high total dietary sugar, and are unlikely to be strongly regressive especially if consumers benefit from averted internalities.

We examine the distributional consequences of post-Brexit trade barriers on wages in the UK.

This paper investigates risk attitudes at older ages in 14 European countries. Older individuals report lower willingness to take risks in all countries.

Interest in the issue of career progression has been growing, fuelled by a decade of stagnant productivity and pay growth (even before the COVID-19 crisis) and concerns that changes in the labour market – such as the casualisation of work in the gig economy – are making it harder for some groups to progress.

This paper estimates the importance of temptation for consumption smoothing and asset accumulation in a structural life-cycle model.

This paper analyzes Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) where identification of structural parameters holds locally but not globally.

Researchers are often interested in the relationship between two variables, with no single data set containing both.

We propose a new simulation-based estimation method, adversarial estimation, for structural models.

This paper provides new evidence on the recent performance of piped water consumption subsidies in terms of pro-poor targeting for 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. Our results suggest that in these countries, existing tariff structures fall well short of recovering the costs of service provision, and that, moreover, the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve the goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water among the poor.

We investigate state‐dependent effects of fiscal multipliers and allow for endogenous sample splitting to determine whether the U.S. economy is in a slack state.

This paper uses a dataset from Tanzania with information on consumption, income and income shocks within and across family networks.

COVID-19 has uprooted many aspects of parents’ daily routines, from their jobs to their childcare arrangements.