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作者：Deryugina, Tatyana
作者单位：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
摘要：Little is known about the fiscal costs of natural disasters, especially regarding social safety nets that do not specifically target extreme weather events. This paper shows that US hurricanes lead to substantial increases in non-disaster government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and public medical payments, in affected counties in the decade after a hurricane. The present value of this increase significantly exceeds that of direct disaster aid. This implies, among other things, tha...
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作者：Palguta, Jan; Pertold, Filip
作者单位：Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Charles University Prague
摘要：We present evidence of how policies that create opportunities to avoid open competition in procurement lead to the manipulation of procurement values. We exploit a policy reform in which public bodies were given the autonomy to preselect potential contractors below newly defined discretionary thresholds. Manipulation is revealed through bunching of procurements just below the thresholds in construction works and services, and to a lesser degree, in goods. Among manipulated contracts, we docume...
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作者：McInerney, Melissa; Mellor, Jennifer M.; Sabik, Lindsay M.
作者单位：Tufts University; William & Mary; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh
摘要：Do Medicaid expansions to working-age adults affect healthcare spending and utilization among older Medicare beneficiaries? Although economic theory provides conflicting predictions about the presence and direction of such spillover effects, it does identify circumstances when spillovers can reduce Medicare spending. Using data on Medicaid expansions during the 2000s and microdata from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, we find that a 1 percentage point rise in the share of working-age a...
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作者：Diamond, Rebecca
作者单位：Stanford University
摘要：Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects benefiting special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments' abilities to extract rents. Inelastic housing supply, driven by exogenous variation in local topography, raises local governments' tax revenues and causes citizens to combat rent seeking by enacting laws limiting the power of elected officials. I find that public sector wor...
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作者：Peck, Jennifer R.
作者单位：Swarthmore College
摘要：This paper studies the effects of quota-based labor regulations on firms in the context of Saudi Arabia's Nitaqat program, which imposed quotas for Saudi hiring at private firms. I use a comprehensive firm-level administrative dataset and exploit kinks in hiring incentives generated by the quotas to estimate the effects of this policy. I find that the program increased native employment at substantial cost to firms, as demonstrated by increasing exit rates and decreasing total employment at su...
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作者：Besley, Timothy; Ghatak, Maitreesh
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
摘要：When social benefits cannot be measured, an organization that selects managers based on pro-social motivation can be used to balance profits with a social purpose. This paper develops a model of social enterprise based on selection of citizen-managers to run firms with flexible missions. We analyze organizational choice between social enterprise, for-profits, and nonprofits. The paper also develops the implications of matching between founders and managers based on their preferences for the mi...
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作者：Pei, Zhuan
作者单位：Cornell University
摘要：Conventional labor supply studies assume constant eligibility monitoring of income-tested program participants, but the time between two consecutive eligibility certifications (the recertification period) can be as long as a year for Medicaid /CHIP recipients. In this paper, I study the optimal recertification period for this population. A long recertification period, while reducing monitoring costs, is predicted to induce program participation via temporary income adjustments. However, I find...
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作者：Lawson, Nicholas
作者单位：University of Quebec; University of Quebec Montreal
摘要：A common finding of the optimal unemployment insurance (UI) literature is that the optimal replacement rate is around 50 percent; however, a key assumption is that UI is the only government spending activity. I show that optimal UI levels may be dramatically reduced when UI is a small part of overall spending: the negative impact of UI on income tax revenues implies added welfare costs, a mechanism that I call a fiscal externality. Using both a standard calibrated structural job search model a...
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作者：Borcan, Oana; Lindahl, Mikael; Mitrut, Andreea
作者单位：University of East Anglia; University of Gothenburg; University of Gothenburg
摘要：We investigate the efficiency and distributional consequences of a corruptionfighting initiative in Romania targeting the endemic fraud in a high-stakes high school exit exam, which introduced CCTV monitoring of the exam and credible punishment threats. We find that punishment coupled with monitoring was effective in reducing corruption. Estimating the heterogeneous impact for students of different ability, poverty status, and gender, we show that fighting corruption led to efficiency gains (a...
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作者：Spinnewijn, Johannes
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：Recent evidence underlines the importance of demand frictions distorting insurance choices. Heterogeneous frictions cause the willingness to pay for insurance to be biased upward (relative to value) for those purchasing insurance, but downward for those who remain uninsured. The paper integrates this finding with standard methods for evaluating welfare in insurance markets and demonstrates how welfare conclusions regarding adversely selected markets are affected. The demand frictions framework...
