Michael D. Bordo of Rutgers University reviews “Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy” by Carola Binder. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores how price fluctuations and attempts to manage them have shaped American democracy, analyzing examples of the disparate impacts of price fluctuations and their political consequences.”

The empirical economics literature on taxation in developing countries has centered on the importance of third-party information for enforcement. Yet, while surely a long-run objective, leveraging such information remains out of reach in many developing countries due to largely informal economies and low state capacity. This article examines an emerging complementary literature focused on strengthening the “sinews” of state capacity: tax administration. We argue that reforms to the organizational structure, personnel management, and task management of tax authorities have potential to raise tax capacity in developing countries. We also argue that efforts to improve the state’s legitimacy—popular acceptance of its right to tax—can increase capacity and may complement investments in tax administration. Our approach bridges a long-standing divide between how scholars in public finance and political economy approach tax capacity building in developing countries.

We study how firms can design their organizational structures to overcome dynamic commitment problems when entering new markets. A manager exerts costly effort to first develop and subsequently manage an investment opportunity. Ex post, the firm underinvests in projects that generate high management rents. However, the prospect of those rents helps offset the manager’s initial project development cost, making ex ante commitment to invest optimal. Levered subsidiaries mitigate this time-consistency problem by introducing risk-shifting incentives that counteract underinvestment. Subsidiaries are most valuable for projects that are costly to develop, have moderate management costs, and yield returns uncorrelated with existing business.

Companies are strongly encouraged to implement whistleblowing programs to help detect and deter misconduct in organizations, but whistleblowers often face ostracism, as their coworkers are less willing to work with them (the whistleblower effect). Rewarding the whistleblower and protecting the whistleblower's identity are two highly recommended features of whistleblowing programs that aim to encourage reporting. Across two experiments, I examine the spillover effects of these whistleblowing program features on how willing employees are to work with their coworkers after reporting occurs. I find that providing a reward to the whistleblower exacerbates the whistleblower effect, leading employees to work even less with the whistleblower (the reward effect). I also find that protecting the whistleblower's identity removes the reward effect but does not remove the whistleblower effect. Instead, the whistleblower effect is extended to neutral coworkers. As a result, when employees do not know the identity of the whistleblower, they view their coworkers less as separate individuals and are less willing to work with everyone in their group.

We study treatment-effect estimation using panel data. The treatment may be nonbinary, nonabsorbing, and the outcome may be affected by treatment lags. We make a parallel-trends assumption and propose event-study estimators of the effect of being exposed to a weakly higher treatment dose for ℓ periods. We also propose normalized estimators that estimate a weighted average of the effects of the current treatment and its lags. We also analyze commonly used two-way, fixed-effects regressions. Unlike our estimators, they can be biased in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. A local-projection version of those regressions is biased even with homogeneous effects.

Calls for greater transparency in PCAOB inspections have intensified amid persistent concerns about opacity and inconsistency. We integrate prior academic research with in-depth interviews from 29 former PCAOB inspectors to construct a detailed, phase-based account of the inspection process over global network firms. We organize insights into four sequential phases—hiring, training, and performance assessment; planning; execution; and resolution—and present structured taxonomies that combine the literature with novel, practice-based observations. The paper’s primary contribution lies in organizing fragmented research and insider perspectives into a framework that clarifies how inspections operate in practice and where further research is critical. This synthesis provides a structured foundation for researchers, practitioners, and regulators seeking to evaluate and strengthen audit oversight—at a time when the structure and independence of the PCAOB itself faces renewed political scrutiny.

Sovereign debt yields have undergone a historic decline over the last half century. Standard explanations, including aging populations and increases in asset demand from abroad, encounter difficulties when confronted with the full range of evidence. We propose an explanation based on a decline in inflation and default risk. We show that a model with sovereign default captures the decline in interest rates, the stability of equity valuation ratios, and the reduction in investment and output growth. Calibrations of the model post-COVID suggest that sovereign default risk may have returned.

What explains wealth and portfolio differences between black and white Americans? We find that disparities in economic factors explain portfolios well, but only partly explain the wealth gap. In a dynamic setting, economic factors often change optimal saving rates in ways that offset their effects on income and returns. Consequently, their net wealth effect is often limited, making the wealth gap harder to explain. We estimate that differences in income levels, income risk, family structures, mortality, health expenditures, property taxes, mortgage rates, and asset returns explain half of the differential between the racial wealth gap and the racial income gap.

This paper revisits the relationship between federal debt and interest rates in the U.S. A common approach is to regress long-term forward interest rates on long-term projections of federal debt. We show that issues regarding nonstationarity have become more pronounced over the last 20 years, significantly biasing recent estimates. Estimating the model in first differences rather than in levels addresses these concerns. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio raises the 5-year-ahead, 5-year Treasury rate by about 3 basis points. Roughly half of the interest rate response is driven by a higher nominal term premium.