Measurement

How rich are the richest Americans? A thorough answer to this question is necessary to address public concern over rising inequality, whether the distribution of resources is fair, and how policy ought to respond. This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States.

A glitch with the standard algorithm stimulated a broader question: Is there an inequality measure that both captures how people experience economic disparities and independently of the number of wealth holders, is not downward-biased?

Racial disparities are pervasive in many stages of the criminal justice system, but are often challenging to interpret. This paper shows how the quasi-random assignment of bail judges can be used to isolate release disparities among defendants with identical misconduct potential, a discrimination measure broadly linked to legal theories of disparate impact.

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.

By providing confidence sets for ranks, this paper addresses the problem that rankings, for example, of neighborhoods in the US according to intergenerational mobility can be more or less informative.