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作者：Mayer, Adalbert; Puller, Steven L.
作者单位：Texas A&M University System; Texas A&M University College Station
摘要：This paper documents the structure and composition of social networks on university campuses and investigates the processes that lead to their formation. Using administrative data and information from Facebook.com, we document the factors that are the strongest predictors of whether two students are friends. Race is strongly related to social ties, even after controlling for a variety of measures of socioeconomic background, ability, and college activities. We develop a model of the formation ...
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作者：Petrova, Maria
作者单位：Harvard University
摘要：Popular support of redistributive policies depends on information they have about the tax system and efficiency of public projects. Mass media provides a convenient means for manipulating public opinion, even when voters understand that the media can be biased. I develop a theory of media capture in which the rich can influence information published in a media outlet at a cost. The model shows that higher inequality is associated with lower media freedom; this effect is stronger in democratic ...
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作者：Leeper, Eric M.; Yang, Shu-Chun Susan
作者单位：Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; National Bureau of Economic Research; Academia Sinica - Taiwan
摘要：Neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor income tax rates are expansionary when lump-sum transfers are used to balance the government budget. This paper explores the consequences of bond-financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies, including future government consumption, capital tax rates, or labor tax rates. Through the resulting intertemporal distortions, current tax cuts can be expansionary or contractionary. The paper also...
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作者：da Costa, Carlos E.; Severo, Tiago
作者单位：Getulio Vargas Foundation
摘要：This paper characterizes optimal income taxes and human capital policies in a two period Mirrlees economy. Agents, differentiated by their preferences at birth, invest in human capital not knowing in advance the returns of such investment. Clear cut prescriptions are not always possible even when we focus on specific assumptions about the relative importance of heterogeneity at birth and heterogeneity that arises later in life. Yet, we are still able to identify which combinations of policies ...
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作者：Corneo, Giacomo; Fong, Christina M.
作者单位：Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Free University of Berlin; Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：This paper proposes a model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice, defined as distribution according to desert. We derive a formula that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from fiscal data and the estimated coefficients of a probit regression. Using this formula and data from a 1998 Gallup Social Audit, we find that on average the monetary value of justice for US households amounts to about one fifth of their disp...
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作者：Gustavsson, Magnus; Jordahl, Henrik
作者单位：Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN); Uppsala University
摘要：We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy, we find that differences in disposable income, and especially differences among people in the bottom half of the income distribution, are associated with lower trust. The relationship between income inequality and trust is particularly strong for people with a strong aversion against income differentials. We also ...
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作者：Konow, James; Earley, Joseph
作者单位：Loyola Marymount University
摘要：The Hedonistic Paradox states that homo economicus, or someone who seeks happiness for him- or herself, will not find it, but the person who helps others will. This study examines two questions in connection with happiness and generosity. First, do more generous people, as identified in dictator experiments, report on average greater happiness, or subjective well-being (SVM), as measured by responses to various questionnaires? Second, if the answer is affirmative, what is the causal relationsh...
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作者：Conconi, Paola; Perroni, Carlo; Riezman, Raymond
作者单位：Universite Libre de Bruxelles; University of Warwick; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Iowa
摘要：We consider a setting in which capital taxation is characterized by two distortions working in opposite directions. On one hand, governments engage in tax competition and are tempted to lower capital tax rates. On the other hand, they are unable to commit to future policies and, once capital has been installed, have incentives to increase taxes. In this setting, there exists a tax that optimally trades off the two distortions. We compare three possible tax harmonization scenarios: no tax harmo...
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作者：Ludema, Rodney D.; Ofsgard, Anders
作者单位：Georgetown University; Georgetown University
摘要：When a government creates an agency to gather information relevant to policymaking, it faces two critical organizational questions: whether the agency should be given authority to decide on policy or merely supply advice, and what should the policy goals of the agency be. Existing literature on the first question is unable to address the second, because the question of authority becomes moot if the government can simply replicate its preferences within the agency. In contrast, this paper exami...
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作者：Brooks, Leah
作者单位：McGill University
摘要：When the median voter's preference sets the level of local public goods, some voters are left unsatisfied. Is there an institution by which subsets of voters can resolve the collective action problem and increase the local provision of public goods? If so, what are the consequences? In response to problems such as crime and vandalism, neighborhood property owners have established Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) to provide local public goods. When a BID is approved by a majority of proper...
