There exist salient differences between East Asia and North America both in student effort and in the propensity to attribute success to ability (instead of effort) with East Asian students studying more and being less likely to attribute success to ability than their North American counterparts. This paper uses a Tullock contest model with heterogenous ability levels to study the effects on both equilibrium student effort and equilibrium success attribution to ability from a few country-specific factors including the mean and dispersion of the ability distribution, as well as the size of reward for educational success. We find that equilibrium effort increases and the tendency to attribute success to ability decreases when the dispersion of the ability distribution is smaller or when the mean ability level is larger. Further, having a higher relative value for educational success, which provides a stronger motivation for academic performance, results in higher equilibrium effort, although it has no impact on success attribution.
This paper examines the reduced-form relationship between top marginal federal income tax rates and subsequent economic growth using annual United States data from 1929 to 2024: real gross domestic product per capita from the Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts and statutory top marginal federal income tax rates from the Tax Policy Center. Contrary to the standard supply-side view, which predicts a uniformly negative tax-growth relationship, the results show a positive association over much of the observed historical range, with the relationship turning negative only at higher tax levels. A quadratic specification estimates the turning point near 64 percent, placing most historical observations on the upward-sloping portion of the relationship. The relationship is stable across institutional regimes, holding in both the post-1982 buyback era and the earlier period. To explain this pattern, the paper develops the Aston Martin mechanism, in which high marginal tax rates raise the cost of income extraction for owner-managers of closely held firms, shifting resources toward internal retention and capital formation. The findings are reduced-form and do not identify causal channels, but they challenge simple monotonic claims about taxation and growth and suggest that income allocation between extraction and retention is a central link between tax policy and economic performance. For tax policy, the results caution against the assumption that cutting top marginal rates reliably raises growth. Where financing constraints bind and extraction is costly, as in many emerging economies today, top rates also shape whether income stays inside firms to finance investment.
Firms and policymakers routinely promote time-saving technologies on the assumption that they reduce the time households devote to home production. Yet a century of labor-saving household appliances reduced housework time only modestly, while newer innovations such as on-demand food delivery show more consistent time savings. The divergence reflects a distinction that existing frameworks do not typically make explicit. The relevant question is not whether a technology saves time, but which component of the household production problem it affects. Efficiency-improving technologies raise demand for home-produced goods, but their effect on total housework time is ambiguous because the induced increase in home-good consumption may be smaller than, equal to, or larger than the direct reduction in time required per unit. Technologies that lower the full price of market substitutes, which combine the money outlay with the time a household must spend obtaining the good, tend to produce more systematic substitution away from home production when the compensated composition effect outweighs the accompanying aggregate-demand response. This paper develops a simple household production framework that formalizes this distinction and illustrates the mechanisms using three contemporary technologies, namely robotic cleaning devices, food delivery platforms, and meal kit services. The American Time Use Survey series covering 2003–2019 and 2021–2024 illustrates the divergent time-use patterns that the framework is designed to organize. The framework implies that a technology’s time effect depends on the parameter it changes. Reductions in the full price of market alternatives reduce home-production time when the elasticity of substitution exceeds the aggregate demand elasticity, whereas the effect of a pure home-production efficiency improvement is generally ambiguous.
Source of income laws prohibit landlords from discriminating against rental housing applicants based on reported income sources. Such laws are now in force in more than 20 states and 100 local jurisdictions. Prior research has focused on their impact on recipients of Housing Choice Vouchers. This paper provides the first examination of their effects on recipients of non-voucher categories of protected income, including Supplemental Security Income and welfare payments. Using American Community Survey microdata from 2006 to 2021, aggregated to the Consistent Public Use Microdata Area-by-year level, and a robust event-study estimator, the analysis estimates intent-to-treat effects on residential mobility, gross rent, household size, and crowding for likely-affected renters. Estimated effects are uniformly close to zero across all four outcomes. The mobility estimates are precise enough to rule out increases above 2 to 3 percentage points, equivalent to relative increases above 10
