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作者：Tran, Anh; Zeckhauser, Richard
作者单位：Harvard University; Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington
摘要：Money is the prime incentive considered in economic models. However, recent evidence indicates that people are also greatly concerned about their social rankings. Is this solely because rank brings tangible benefits, or because in addition people have an inherent preference for high rank? This paper deployed a field experiment that provides evidence for an inherent preference. In the experiment, Vietnamese students enrolled in an English course performed significantly better on the official st...
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作者：Bauhoff, Sebastian
作者单位：RAND Corporation
摘要：This paper evaluates whether health plans in Germany's Social Health Insurance select on an easily observable predictor of risk: geography. To identify plan behavior separately from concurrent demand-side adverse selection, I implement a double-blind audit study in which plans are contacted by fictitious applicants from different locations. I find that plans are less likely to respond and follow-up with applicants from higher-cost regions, such as West Germany. The results suggest that supply-...
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作者：Becker, Sascha O.; Egger, Peter H.; Merlo, Valeria
作者单位：University of Warwick; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich
摘要：Most existing empirical evidences on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity are based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but also with other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable characteristics. We compile a database of more than 11,000 municipalities in Germany to analyze the sensitivity of location decisions of foreign MNEs in Germany with respect to business tax rates...
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作者：Lee, David; Saez, Emmanuel
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Princeton University
摘要：This paper provides a theoretical analysis of optimal minimum wage policy in a perfectly competitive labor market and obtains two key results. First, we show that a binding minimum wage - while leading to unemployment - is nevertheless desirable if the government values redistribution toward low wage workers and if unemployment induced by the minimum wage hits the lowest surplus workers first. Importantly, this result remains true in the presence of optimal nonlinear taxes and transfers. In th...
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作者：Ellingsen, Tore; Paltseva, Elena
作者单位：Stockholm School of Economics; Stockholm School of Economics
摘要：Does voluntary contracting suffice for the efficient provision of excludable public goods? Even in a complete information environment, we find that the answer is negative. The reason is that some agents may profit from not participating at the provision stage, but instead negotiate access ex post. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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作者：Ferraz, Claudio; Finan, Frederico; Moreira, Diana B.
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper examines if money matters in education by looking at whether missing resources due to corruption affect student outcomes. We use data from the auditing of Brazil's local governments to construct objective measures of corruption involving educational block grants transferred from the central government to municipalities. Using variation in the incidence of corruption across municipalities and controlling for student, school, and municipal characteristics, we find a significant negati...
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作者：Spataro, Luca; Renstroem, Thomas I.
作者单位：Durham University; University of Pisa
摘要：We analyze tax policies in an intertemporal economy with endogenous fertility under critical-level utilitarianism, both from a positive and a normative standpoint. On the positive side, we analyze the effects of a change in the tax on capital income and on fertility, both separately and combined so as to keep the per-capita public debt constant. On the normative side, we characterize the first- and second-best optimal tax structures, for both exogenous and endogenous labor supply. (C) 2012 Els...
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作者：Levinson, Arik
作者单位：Georgetown University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper describes and implements a method for valuing a time-varying local public good: air quality. It models survey respondents' self-reported happiness as a function of their demographic characteristics, incomes, and the air pollution and weather on the date and in the place they were surveyed. People with higher incomes report higher levels of happiness, and people interviewed on days with worse local air pollution report lower levels of happiness. Combining these two concepts, I derive...
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作者：Earnhart, Dietrich; Segerson, Kathleen
作者单位：University of Kansas; University of Connecticut
摘要：This paper analyzes the influence of financial status on the effectiveness of environmental enforcement. It considers multiple dimensions of both enforcement and financial status. Regarding enforcement, the paper considers both the likelihood of enforcement, as captured by the likelihood of inspections conducted at regulated facilities, and the severity of enforcement, as captured by the size of sanctions imposed on polluting facilities found violating their effluent limits. As indicators of c...
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作者：Nikiforakis, Nikos; Noussair, Charles N.; Wilkening, Tom
作者单位：University of Melbourne; Max Planck Society; Tilburg University
摘要：A normative conflict arises when multiple plausible rules exist, specifying how one ought to behave in a given situation. In such cases, enforcing one normative rule can lead to a sequence of mutual retaliatory sanctions, which we refer to as a feud. We investigate the hypothesis that normative conflict enhances the likelihood of a feud in a public-good experiment. Normative conflict in our experiment arises from the fact that individuals derive different benefits from the public good. We find...
