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作者：Clemens, Jeffrey; Miran, Stephen
作者单位：Stanford University
摘要：Balanced budget requirements lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in state government spending, with the stringency of a state's rules driving the pace at which it must adjust to shocks. We show that fiscal institutions can generate natural experiments in deficit-financed spending that are informative regarding fiscal stabilization policy. Alternative sources of variation in subnational fiscal policy often implicitly involve windfall financing, which precludes any effect of future debt or taxat...
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作者：Fowlie, Meredith; Knittel, Christopher R.; Wolfram, Catherine
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：For political and practical reasons, environmental regulations sometimes treat point-source polluters, such as power plants, differently from mobile-source polluters, such as vehicles. This paper measures the extent of this regulatory asymmetry in the case of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the most recalcitrant criteria air pollutant in the United States. We find significant differences in marginal abatement costs across source types: the marginal cost of reducing NOx from cars is less than half the m...
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作者：Harding, Matthew; Leibtag, Ephraim; Lovenheim, Michael F.
作者单位：Stanford University; United States Department of Agriculture (USDA); Cornell University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：We use Nielsen Homescan data to examine who bears the economic burden of cigarette taxes. We find cigarette taxes are less than fully passed through to consumer prices, suggesting consumers and producers split the excess burden of these taxes. Using information on consumer location, we show the availability of lower-tax goods across state borders creates significant differences in the pass-through rate. Tax avoidance opportunities also have a sizable effect on purchasing behavior by altering c...
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作者：Novy-Marx, Robert; Rauh, Joshua D.
作者单位：University of Rochester; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Rochester; Northwestern University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Northwestern University
摘要：During the last quarter of 2008, financial losses in state pension funds varied from 12 percent to 68 percent of the revenue generated by the state government. We quantify a sovereign default channel in the state municipal market by examining how changes in bond spreads vary with state pension fund losses, controlling for credit ratings and various measures of the state's fiscal strength. Municipal bond spreads rose by 7-15 basis points for each 10 percent of state-generated revenue lost by st...
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作者：Gans, Joshua S.
作者单位：University of Toronto
摘要：This paper examines whether climate change policies will induce innovation in environmentally friendly technologies. The model demonstrates that a tighter emissions cap will reduce the scale of fossil fuel usage and that this will diminish incentives to improve fossil fuel efficiencies. In addition, such policies may stimulate the relative demand for innovations that improve the efficiency of alternative energy but carbon scarcity may diminish innovation incentives overall. Only for technologi...
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作者：Auerbach, Alan J.; Gorodnichenko, Yuriy
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：A key issue in current research and policy is the size of fiscal multipliers when the economy is in recession. We provide three insights. First, using regime-switching models, we find large differences in the size of spending multipliers in recessions and expansions with fiscal policy being considerably more effective in recessions than in expansions. Second, we estimate multipliers for more disaggregate spending variables which behave differently relative to aggregate fiscal policy shocks, wi...
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作者：Chen, Yihsu; Whalley, Alexander
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Merced; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：The transportation sector is a major source of air pollution worldwide, yet little is known about the effects of transportation infrastructure on air quality. This paper quantifies the effects of one major type of transportation infrastructure-urban rail transit-on air quality using the sharp discontinuity in ridership on opening day of a new rail transit system in Taipei. We find that the opening of the Metro reduced air pollution from one key tailpipe pollutant, carbon monoxide, by 5 to 15 p...
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作者：Behaghel, Luc; Blau, David M.
作者单位：INRAE; Paris School of Economics; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; University System of Ohio; Ohio State University
摘要：We use a US Social Security reform as a quasi-experiment to provide evidence on framing effects in retirement behavior. The reform increased the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 66 in two-month increments per year of birth. We find strong evidence that the spike in the benefit claiming hazard at 65 moved in lockstep along with the FRA. Results on self-reported retirement and exit from employment go in the same direction. The responsiveness to the new FRA is stronger for people with higher ...
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作者：Feyrer, James; Shambaugh, Jay
作者单位：Dartmouth College; National Bureau of Economic Research; Georgetown University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper examines the effect of exogenous shocks to savings on world capital markets. Exogenous tax increases in the United States (from Romer and Romer 2010) are only partially offset by changes in domestic private savings, and only a small amount is absorbed by increased domestic investment (contra Feldstein and Horioka 1980). Almost half the change in taxes is transmitted abroad through a change in the US current account. Other countries experience decreases in current accounts and increa...
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作者：Gruber, Jonathan; Kleiner, Samuel A.
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; Cornell University
摘要：Hospitals now represent one of the largest union sectors of the US economy, and there is particular concern about the impact of strikes on patient welfare. We analyze the effects of nurses' strikes in hospitals on patient outcomes in New York State. Controlling for hospital specific heterogeneity, the results show that nurses' strikes increase in-hospital mortality by 18.3 percent and 30-day readmission by 5.7 percent for patients admitted during a strike, with little change in patient demogra...
