The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

Calibration, the practice of choosing the parameters of a structural model to match certain empirical moments, can be viewed as minimum distance estimation. Existing standard error formulas for such estimators require a consistent estimate of the correlation structure of the empirical moments, which is often unavailable in practice. Instead, the variances of the individual empirical moments are usually readily estimable. Using only these variances, we derive conservative standard errors and confidence intervals for the structural parameters that are valid even under the worst-case correlation structure.

We measure the distribution of welfare losses from non-competitive behavior in the U.S. credit card industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The early credit card industry was characterized by regional monopolies. Ensuing legal decisions led to competitive reforms that resulted in greater, but still limited, oligopolistic competition. We measure the distributional consequences of these reforms by developing and estimating a heterogeneous agent, defaultable debt framework with oligopolistic lenders.

This paper investigates the construction of moment conditions in discrete choice panel data with individual specific fixed effects. We describe how to systematically explore the existence of moment conditions that do not depend on the fixed effects, and we demonstrate how to construct them when they exist. Our approach is closely related to the numerical “functional differencing” construction in Bonhomme (2012), but our emphasis is to find explicit analytic expressions for the moment functions.

Neither theory nor existing empirical evidence support the notion that wealth taxation reduces saving. Theoretically, the effect is ambiguous due to opposing income and substitution effects, and empirically, the effect may be masked by misreporting responses. Using geographic discontinuities in the Norwegian annual net-wealth tax and third-party-reported data on savings, I find that wealth taxation causes households to save more. Each additional NOK of wealth tax increases annual net financial saving by 3.76, implying that households increase saving enough to offset both current and future wealth taxes.

We develop a framework to understand pre-employment credit screening as a signal from credit markets that alleviates adverse selection in labor markets. In our theory, people differ in both their propensity to default on debt and the profits they create for firms that employ them; in our calibrated economy, highly productive workers have a low default probability. This leads firms to create more jobs for those with good credit, which creates a poverty trap: an unemployed worker with poor credit has a low job finding rate, but cannot improve her credit without a job.

We develop a method of solving rational expectations models with dispersed information and dynamic strategic complementarities. In these types of models, the equilibrium outcome hinges on an infinite number of higher-order expectations which require an increasing number of state variables to keep track of. Despite this complication, we prove that the equilibrium outcome always admits a finite-state representation when the signals follow finite ARMA processes.