-
作者：Reback, Randall
作者单位：Columbia University
摘要：This paper examines whether minimum competency school accountability systems, such as those created under No Child Left Behind, influence the distribution of student achievement. Because school ratings in these systems only incorporate students' test scores via pass rates, this type of system increases incentives for schools to improve the performance of students who are on the margin of passing but does not increase short-run incentives for schools to improve other students' performance. Usin...
-
作者：Kroft, Kory
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：This paper examines the optimal provision of unemployment insurance (UI) in a framework that accounts for behavioral responses along both the intensive and extensive margins. Two formulations of takeup are considered: in the first, individuals face a takeup cost that is exogenous; in the second, the cost depends endogenously on the takeup rate. Such endogenous costs to takeup lead to a social multiplier, a reduced-form parameter summarizing the strength of social interactions. This paper deriv...
-
作者：Zhang, Jie; Davies, James; Zeng, Jinli; McDonald, Stuart
作者单位：University of Queensland; Western University (University of Western Ontario); National University of Singapore; California Institute of Technology
摘要：In a neoclassical growth model with public consumption, we show the following Pareto optimal tax rules. The government should tax leisure and private consumption at the same rate, and subsidize net investment at the same rate it taxes net capital income. Also, it should tax capital income more heavily than labor income. In an extension for home production, the additional rule is to tax investment for home production at the same rate of the tax on private market consumption. These tax and subsi...
-
作者：Dahlberg, Matz; Moerk, Eva; Rattso, Jorn; Agren, Hanna
作者单位：Uppsala University; Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU)
摘要：When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor. Federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of decentralized governments. In this paper we make use of a discontinuity in the Swedish grant system in order to estimate the causal effects of general intergovernmental grants on local spending and local tax rates. The formula for the distribution of funds...
-
作者：Cahuc, Pierre; Zylberberg, AndrE
作者单位：Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
摘要：This paper analyzes optimum income taxation in a model with endogenous job destruction that gives rise to unemployment. It is shown that optimal tax schemes comprise both payroll and layoff taxes when the state provides public unemployment insurance and aims at redistributing income. The optimal layoff tax is equal to the social cost of job destruction, which amounts to the sum of unemployment benefits (that the state pays to unemployed workers) and payroll taxes (that the state does not get w...
-
作者：Schmidt, Stephen J.; McCarty, Therese A.
作者单位：Union College
摘要：We use a twenty-one year panel of data to examine the role of past income and aid, and expectations of future income, in regressions explaining state and local education spending. We show that simple estimates of the elasticity of spending with respect to financial resources are not robust to specification changes because the variables are non-stationary over time, causing inconsistent estimation of model parameters. Estimation in first differences (or equivalently, in growth rates) solves the...
-
作者：Alonso-Carrera, Jaime; Caballe, Jordi; Raurich, Xavier
作者单位：Autonomous University of Barcelona; Autonomous University of Barcelona; Universidade de Vigo; Universidade de Vigo; University of Barcelona; University of Barcelona
摘要：We study how the introduction of consumption externalities affects the optimality of the dynamic equilibrium in an economy displaying dynastic altruism. When the bequest motive is inoperative consumption externalities affect the intertemporal margin between young and old consumption and thus modify the intertemporal path of aggregate consumption and capital. The optimal tax policy that solves this intertemporal suboptimality consists of a tax on capital income and a pay-as-you-go social securi...
-
作者：LaLumia, Sara
作者单位：Williams College
摘要：The United States changed its tax treatment of married couples in 1948, from a system in which each spouse paid taxes on his or her own income to a system in which a married couple is taxed as a unit. The switch from separate to joint taxation changed incentives for labor supply and asset ownership. This paper investigates the effects of the conversion to joint taxation, taking advantage of a natural experiment created by cross-state variation in property laws. Married individuals in states wi...
-
作者：Bernhardt, Dan; Krasa, Stefan; Polborn, Mattias
作者单位：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：We develop a model in which profits of media firms depend on their audience ratings, and maximizing profits may involve catering to a partisan audience by suppressing information that the partisan audience does not like bearing. While voters are rational, understand the nature of the news suppression bias and update appropriately, important information is lost through bias and can lead to electoral mistakes. We characterize those conditions that give rise to electoral mistakes, showing that he...
-
作者：Coate, Stephen; Conlin, Michael; Moro, Andrea
作者单位：Cornell University; Michigan State University; Federal Reserve System - USA; Federal Reserve Bank - New York; Vanderbilt University
摘要：This paper explores the ability of pivotal-voter models to explain voter behavior in small-scale elections using data from Texas liquor referenda. The findings provide little support for the view that pivotal-voter models are a reasonable theory for understanding small-scale elections. Interestingly, this is not because they cannot explain the levels of turnout in the data, but rather because they cannot explain the size of the winning margins. The logic of pivotal-voter models implies that el...
