-
作者:Harju, Jarkko; Kosonen, Tuomas; Skans, Oskar Nordstrom
作者单位:VATT Institute for Economic Research; Research Council of Finland; Uppsala University
摘要:We analyze price responses to large restaurant VAT rate reductions in two different European countries. Our results show that responses in the short and medium run were clustered around two focal points of zero pass-through and full pass-through. Differences between independent restaurants and chains is the key explanation for this pattern. While nearly all independent restaurants effectively ignored the tax reductions and left consumer prices unchanged, a substantial fraction of restaurants b...
-
作者:Carrillo, Paul E.; Lopez-Luzuriaga, Andrea; Malik, Arun S.
作者单位:George Washington University
摘要:Driving restriction programs have been implemented in many cities around the world to alleviate pollution and congestion problems. Enforcement of such programs is costly and can potentially displace policing resources used for crime prevention and crime detection. Hence, driving restrictions may increase crime. To test this hypothesis, we exploit both temporal and spatial variation in the implementation of Quito, Ecuador's Pico y Placa program, and evaluate its effect on crime. Both difference...
-
作者:Blakeslee, David S.
作者单位:New York University; New York University Abu Dhabi
摘要:This paper employs an instrumental variables strategy to identify the effect of party ideology on policy outcomes. Exogenous variation in party representation is generated by the assassination of the leader of the Congress party, which occurred midway through India's national elections in 1991, and dramatically increased the probability of Congress victory for a subset of constituencies. Representation by the Congress party leads to a substantial increase in the provision of public goods favor...
-
作者:Chen, Yongmin; Li, Jianpei
作者单位:University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder; University of International Business & Economics
摘要:When procuring multiple products from competing sellers, a buyer may choose separate purchase, pure bundling, or mixed bundling. We show that pure bundling maximizes buyer surplus when there are two sellers and trade for each good is likely efficient, whereas separate purchase can be optimal for the buyer when there are more sellers or one good has a low probability of trade. We explain how these results are related to the reduction of sellers' cost dispersion and the potential adverse tying u...
-
作者:Kasy, Maximilian
作者单位:Harvard University
摘要:How should one use (quasi -)experimental evidence when choosing policies such as tax rates, health insurance copay, unemployment benefit levels, and class sizes in schools? This paper suggests an approach based on maximizing posterior expected social welfare, combining insights from (i) optimal policy theory as developed in the field of public finance, and (ii) machine learning using Gaussian process priors. We provide explicit formulas for posterior expected social welfare and optimal policie...
-
作者:Arai, Real; Naito, Katsuyuki; Ono, Tetsuo
作者单位:Kochi University Technology; University of Osaka
摘要:This study presents a two-period overlapping-generations model with endogenous growth. In each period, the government representing young and old generations provides a public good financed by labor income taxation and public debt issuance, and the government's policies are determined by probabilistic voting. Increased political power of the old lowers economic growth. A debt-ceiling rule is considered to resolve the negative growth effect, but it creates a trade-off between generations in term...
-
作者:Estache, Antonio; Foucart, Renaud
作者单位:Universite Libre de Bruxelles; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Humboldt University of Berlin
摘要:Cost inefficiencies in public procurement tend to come from two sources: corruption (moral hazard) and incompetence (adverse selection). In most countries, audit authorities are responsible for monitoring costs but do not distinguish both sources of inefficiency in their audits. Judicial courts typically rely on these cost audits, but only sanction corruption. In a model of public procurement by politicians, we study how the respective quality of the two courts affects corruption as well as co...
-
作者:Kuhn, Michael A.
作者单位:University of Oregon
摘要:Monthly welfare programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) produce consistent cycles of expenditure and consumption among recipients. Food insecurity, health status, crime, poor behavior and test scores track these cycles. This paper leverages new data from the USDA-the FoodAPS survey-to better understand these cycles in three ways. First, I find that expenditure and consumption cycles are correlated within households-a fact not previously established. Second, I stud...
-
作者:Macartney, Hugh; Singleton, John D.
作者单位:Duke University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Rochester
摘要:This paper provides the first causal evidence about how elected local school boards affect student segregation across schools. The key identification challenge is that the composition of a school board is potentially correlated with unobserved determinants of school segregation. We overcome this issue using a regression discontinuity design at the electoral contest level, exploiting quasi-random variation from narrowly-decided elections. Such an approach is made possible by a unique dataset, w...
-
作者:Alstadsaeter, Annette; Johannesen, Niels; Zucman, Gabriel
作者单位:Norwegian University of Life Sciences; University of Copenhagen; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies. We use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries...