The Reporter

Young adults who enter the labor market during recessions can experience negative impacts to their economic, family, and health outcomes that endure into middle age and beyond. Those who join the workforce in a downturn have lower long-term earnings, higher rates of disability, fewer marriages, less successful spouses, and fewer children. In middle age they also have higher mortality due to lung, liver, and heart disease. The long-lasting effects of labor market shocks to...

Economists have long recognized that when consuming a good produces externalities, welfare can be raised by imposing corrective taxes. More recently, there has been a growing belief that some goods should be taxed because of internalities — harms that people might impose on themselves due to limited attention, misunderstanding of financial instruments, systematically biased beliefs about themselves such as overconfidence, or lapses of self-control. One of the...