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作者:Koethenbuerger, Marko; Stimmelmayr, Michael
作者单位:Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut
摘要:Using an agency model of firm behavior, the paper analyzes whether the cost of investment should be tax exempt. The findings suggest that when managers engage in wasteful capital expenditures, welfare may decline if the cost of investment is tax deductible, as commonly advocated. The extent to which the return on investment should be taxed depends on how the internal provision of incentive pay and external monitoring by banks interact in constraining the manager and whether retained earnings o...
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作者:Gehlbach, Scott; Sonin, Konstantin
作者单位:University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
摘要:We present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time. Media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens' individual best interest; however, the distinction between state and private media is smaller. Large advertising markets reduce media bia...
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作者:Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth
摘要:How can we know how much racial animus costs a black presidential candidate, if many people lie to surveys? I suggest a new proxy for an area's racial animus from a non-survey source: the percent of Google search queries that include racially charged language. I compare the proxy to Barack Obama's vote shares, controlling for the vote share of the previous Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. An area's racially charged search rate is a robust negative predictor of Obama's vote share....
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作者:Levy, Nadav; Pauzner, Ady
作者单位:Reichman University; Tel Aviv University
摘要:Public projects typically generate both monetary revenue and social benefits that cannot be monetized. We show that a government concerned with the credit rating of its debt should put different discount rates on these two aspects. The credit rating reflects the probability of default on the government's debt and thus affects its financing costs. Monetary revenues, which can be used in financial distress to repay debt, improve the credit rating and thus carry an additional credit-market value ...
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作者:Allcott, Hunt; Mullainathan, Sendhil; Taubinsky, Dmitry
作者单位:New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
摘要:We analyze optimal policy when consumers of energy-using durables undervalue energy costs relative to their private optima. First, there is an Internality Dividend from Externality Taxes: aside from reducing externalities, they also offset distortions from underinvestment in energy efficiency. Discrete choice simulations of the auto market suggest that the Internality Dividend could more than double the social welfare gains from a carbon tax at marginal damages. Second, we develop the Internal...
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作者:Luque, Jaime; Morelli, Massimo; Tavares, Jose
作者单位:University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; Columbia University; Universidade Nova de Lisboa
摘要:Heterogeneous countries may rationally choose to form a currency union first, and a fiscal union later. We find, and illustrate empirically for the EMU countries, reasonable volatility conditions under which this sequencing in the deepening process is indeed rationalizable. Changes in the distribution of expected income shocks require a reassignment of political weights to restore unanimous support for an added fiscal dimension. The bargaining space depends on countries' relative income, size,...
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作者:Gahvari, Firouz; Micheletto, Luca
作者单位:University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of Milan; Uppsala University; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut
摘要:This paper models a two-period overlapping-generations economy with money populated with individuals of different skills. They face a nonlinear income tax schedule and can engage in tax evasion. Money serves two purposes: the traditional one, modeled through a money-in-the-utility-function; it also facilitates tax evasion. The main message of the paper is that income tax evasion in this framework leads to the violation of the Friedman rule. The paper also shows that even in the absence of tax ...
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作者:Onderstal, Sander; Schram, Arthur J. H. C.; Soetevent, Adriaan R.
作者单位:University of Amsterdam; Tinbergen Institute; University of Groningen
摘要:In a door-to-door fundraising field experiment, we study the impact of fundraising mechanisms on charitable giving. We approached about 4500 households, each participating in an all-pay auction, a lottery, a non-anonymous voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM), or an anonymous VCM. In contrast to the VCMs, households in the all-pay auction and the lottery competed for a prize. Although the all-pay auction is the superior fundraising mechanism both in theory and in the laboratory, it did not ra...
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作者:Rotemberg, Julio J.
作者单位:Harvard University
摘要:This paper presents a model in which anonymous charitable donations are rationalized by two human tendencies drawn from the psychology literature. The first is people's disproportionate disposition to help those they agree with while the second is the dependence of peoples' self-esteem on the extent to which they perceive that others agree with them. Government spending crowds out the charity that ensues from these forces only modestly. Moreover, people's donations tend to rise when others don...
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作者:Vlaicu, Razvan; Verhoeven, Marijn; Grigoli, Francesco; Mills, Zachary
作者单位:University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; The World Bank; International Monetary Fund; The World Bank
摘要:In the last two decades more than 120 countries have adopted a multiyear budget process (Medium-Term Framework, or MTF) that enables the central government to set multiyear fiscal targets. This paper analyzes a newly-collected dataset of worldwide MTF adoptions during 1990-2008. It exploits within-country variation in adoption in a dynamic panel framework to estimate MTFs' impacts on aggregate as well as sectoral measures of fiscal performance. We find that on average multiyear budgeting impro...