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作者：Keen, Michael
作者单位：International Monetary Fund
摘要：This paper explores the implications of a distinctive feature of the value added tax (VAT) that is stressed by practitioners but has been largely overlooked by theorists: that it functions, in part, as a tax on the purchases of informal operators from formal sector businesses and, not least on their imports. It also stresses the potential importance of the withholding taxes that are levied by many developing countries - which have also been ignored. It is shown, in a simple model of informalit...
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作者：Malin, Benjamin A.
作者单位：Federal Reserve System - USA
摘要：Previous research suggests that, in partial equilibrium, individuals whose decision-making exhibits a present-bias - such as hyperbolic discounters who tend to over-consume - will be in favor of having a floor imposed on their savings. In this paper, I show it is quite difficult for the introduction of a savings floor to be Pareto improving in general equilibrium. Indeed, a necessary condition for the floor to be Pareto improving is that it is high enough to be binding for all individuals. Eve...
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作者：Berlinski, Samuel; Galiani, Sebastian; Manacorda, Marco
作者单位：University of London; University College London; Washington University (WUSTL); University of London; Queen Mary University London; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：We study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places. Using a within household estimator, we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that get magnified as children grow up. By age 15, treated children have accumulated 0.8 extra years of educ...
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作者：De Fraja, Gianni
作者单位：University of Leicester; University of Rome Tor Vergata; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
摘要：For many goods and services, such as health, education, legal services, police protection, the cost incurred by an individual supplier for providing quality is affected by the human capital of her colleagues. The paper shows that this human capital externality is crucial to determine whether such goods and services should be privately or publicly provided. Public and private provisions give individuals different incentives to acquire human capital, and the paper shows that either may be social...
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作者：Mills, Gregory; Gale, William G.; Patterson, Rhiannon; Engelhardt, Gary V.; Eriksen, Michael D.; Apostolov, Emil
作者单位：ABT Associates; Brookings Institution; Syracuse University
摘要：We evaluate the first controlled field experiment on Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). Including their own contributions and matching funds, treatment group members in the Tulsa, Oklahoma program could accumulate $6750 for home purchase or $4500 for other qualified uses. Almost all treatment group members opened accounts, but many withdrew all funds for unqualified purposes. Among renters at the beginning of the experiment, the IDA increased homeownership rates after 4 years by 7-11 perc...
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作者：Eissa, Nada; Kleven, Henrik Jacobsen; Kreiner, Claus Thustrup
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Georgetown University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Copenhagen
摘要：An emerging consensus is that labor force participation is more responsive to taxes and transfers than hours worked. To understand the implications of participation responses for the welfare analysis of tax reform, this paper embeds this margin of labor supply in an explicit welfare theoretic framework. We apply the framework to examine the welfare effects on single mothers in the United States following four tax acts passed in 1986, 1990, 1993, and 2001. We propose a simulation method combini...
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作者：Yakita, Akira
作者单位：University of Tsukuba
摘要：Under the golden rule of public finance for public investment with a constant budget deficit/GDP ratio, we show that for the sustainability of government budget deficits there is a threshold of the initial public debt for a given stock of public capital, and that this threshold level of public debt is increasing in the stock of public capital. If the initial public debt is greater than the threshold, the government can no longer sustain budget deficits, while if it is smaller, the government c...
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作者：Bordignon, Massimo; Colombo, Luca; Galmarini, Umberto
作者单位：Catholic University of the Sacred Heart; University of Insubria
摘要：Which government functions should be decentralized (resp. centralized) once lobbying behavior is taken into account? We find that the answer largely depends on how the interests of the regional lobbies are positioned with respect to the function to be decentralized (resp. centralized). When regional lobbies have conflicting interests, then lobbying is less damaging for social welfare under centralization than under decentralization. On the contrary, when regional lobbies have aligned interests...
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作者：Bowles, Samuel; Hwang, Sung-Ha
作者单位：The Santa Fe Institute; University of Siena; University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Amherst
摘要：Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other evidence indicates that conventional economic incentives and social preferences may be either complements or substitutes, explicit incentives crowding in or crowding out social preferences. We investig...
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作者：Gurgand, Marc; Margolis, David N.
作者单位：Paris School of Economics; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; Paris School of Economics; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
摘要：This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary incentives for employment among welfare recipients. Based on the estimated joint distribution of wages and hours potentially offered to each individual, we compute potential gains from working in a very detailed manner. Relating these gains to observed employment, we then estimate a simple structural labor supply model. We find that potential gai...
