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作者：Homonoff, Tatiana A.
作者单位：New York University
摘要：This paper examines a simple element of financial incentive-design whether the incentive takes the form of a fee for bad behavior or a reward for good behavior-to determine if the framing of the incentive influences the policy's effectiveness. I investigate the effect of two similar policies aimed at reducing disposable bag use: a $0.05 tax on disposable bag use and a $0.05 bonus for reusable bag use. While the tax decreased disposable bag use by over 40 percentage points, the bonus generated ...
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作者：Rao, Nirupama L.
作者单位：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan
摘要：The recent boom in US oil production has prompted debates on -levying new taxes on oil. This paper uses new well-level production data and price variation from federal oil taxes and price controls to assess how taxes affected production. After-tax price elasticity estimates range between 0.295 (0.038) and 0.371 (0.025). Response along the shut-in margin is minimal. There is no evidence of spatial shifting of production to minimize tax liabilities. Taken together, the results suggest that taxes...
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作者：Bindler, Anna; Hjalmarsson, Randi
作者单位：University of Gothenburg
摘要：This paper studies the effect of punishment severity on jury decision making using archival data from London's Old Bailey Criminal Court from 1772 to 1871. We exploit two natural experiments in English history, resulting in sharp decreases in punishment severity: the offense-specific abolition of capital punishment and the temporary halt of penal transportation during the American Revolution. Using difference-in-differences to study the former and a pre-post design for the latter, we find a la...
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作者：Alpert, Abby; Powell, David; Pacula, Rosalie Liccardo
作者单位：University of Pennsylvania; RAND Corporation; RAND Corporation; Rand Health
摘要：Overdose deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. We study the consequences of one of the largest supply disruptions to date to abusable opioids-the introduction of an abuse-deterrent version of OxyContin in 2010. Supply-side interventions that limit access to opioids may have the unintended consequence of increasing use of substitute drugs, including heroin. Exploiting cross-state variation in OxyContin exposure, we find that states with the high...
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作者：Scheuer, Florian; Smetters, Kent
作者单位：University of Zurich; University of Pennsylvania
摘要：We document that states that experienced website glitches in the ACA's first year faced higher average costs that persisted into future years. These dynamics are inconsistent with the standard strategic-pricing model, which requires non-localized common knowledge about market conditions, but are consistent with price-taking. Initial conditions can have a permanent effect-including convergence to a Pareto-dominated, stable equilibrium-under conditions that we show are plausible in this setting....
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作者：Knittel, Christopher R.; Sandler, Ryan
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：When consumers or firms don't face the true social cost of their actions, market outcomes are inefficient. In the case of negative externalities, Pigouvian taxes are one way to correct this market failure, but it may be infeasible to tax the externality directly. The alternative, taxing a related product, will be second-best. In this paper, we show that in the presence of heterogeneous externalities and elasticities, this type of indirect tax performs poorly. In our empirical application, gaso...
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作者：Murphy, Alvin
作者单位：Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe
摘要：This paper estimates a dynamic microeconometric model of housing supply. The model features forward-looking landowners who optimally choose both the timing and the nature of construction while taking into account expectations about future prices and costs. The model is estimated using a unique dataset describing individual landowners in the San Francisco Bay Area. Results indicate that geographic and time-series variation in costs are key to understanding where and when construction occurs. Pr...
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作者：Drupp, Moritz A.; Freeman, Mark C.; Groom, Ben; Nesje, Frikk
作者单位：University of Hamburg; University of Kiel; University of York - UK; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of Oslo
摘要：The economic values of investing in long-term public projects are highly sensitive to the social discount rate (SDR). We surveyed over 200 experts to disentangle disagreement on the risk-free SDR into its component parts, including pure time preference, the wealth effect, and return to capital. We show that the majority of experts do not follow the simple Ramsey Rule, a widely used theoretical discounting framework, when recommending SDRs. Despite disagreement on discounting procedures and poi...
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作者：Ganong, Peter; Liebman, Jeffrey B.
作者单位：University of Chicago; Harvard University
摘要：One-in-seven Americans received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2011, an all-time high. We analyze changes in program enrollment over the past two decades, quantifying the contributions of unemployment and state policy changes. Using instrumental variables to address measurement error, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in unemployment raises enrollment by 15 percent. Unemployment explains most of the decrease in enrollment in the late 1990s, state po...
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作者：Falk, Nathan; Shelton, Cameron A.
作者单位：Claremont Colleges; Claremont McKenna College; Claremont Graduate University
摘要：It is found that electorally induced policy uncertainty decreases manufacturing investment in US states. In a state with average partisan polarization, the elasticity of election-year investment to a specific measure of policy uncertainty is -0.027. When the incumbent governor is term limited, there is greater uncertainty over the outcome, providing an instrument to demonstrate this effect is causal, not simply coincidental. Moreover, manufacturing investment does not rebound following the ele...
