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作者:Brueckner, Markus; Chong, Alberto; Gradstein, Mark
作者单位:National University of Singapore; University of Ottawa; Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
摘要:This paper provides instrumental variable estimates of the permanent income elasticity of government expenditures. It uses annual variation in the international oil price weighted with countries' average oil net-export GDP shares as a plausibly exogenous source of within-country variation in countries' permanent income. The short-run estimates of the permanent income elasticity are robust across alternative specifications and are below one: the estimated elasticity coefficients range between 0...
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作者:Markussen, Simen; Mykletun, Arnstein; Roed, Knut
作者单位:Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH)
摘要:Can a work-first strategy control moral hazard problems in temporary disability insurance, and accelerate recovery? Based on empirical analysis of Norwegian data, we show that it can. Activation requirements not only bring down benefit claims, they also reduce the likelihood that long-term sickness absence leads to inactivity. Our findings show that absentees who are assigned graded (partial) absence certificates by their physician have shorter absences and higher subsequent employment rates t...
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作者:Bauhoff, Sebastian
作者单位:RAND Corporation
摘要:This paper evaluates whether health plans in Germany's Social Health Insurance select on an easily observable predictor of risk: geography. To identify plan behavior separately from concurrent demand-side adverse selection, I implement a double-blind audit study in which plans are contacted by fictitious applicants from different locations. I find that plans are less likely to respond and follow-up with applicants from higher-cost regions, such as West Germany. The results suggest that supply-...
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作者:Becker, Sascha O.; Egger, Peter H.; Merlo, Valeria
作者单位:University of Warwick; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich
摘要:Most existing empirical evidences on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity are based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but also with other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable characteristics. We compile a database of more than 11,000 municipalities in Germany to analyze the sensitivity of location decisions of foreign MNEs in Germany with respect to business tax rates...
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作者:Lee, David; Saez, Emmanuel
作者单位:University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Princeton University
摘要:This paper provides a theoretical analysis of optimal minimum wage policy in a perfectly competitive labor market and obtains two key results. First, we show that a binding minimum wage - while leading to unemployment - is nevertheless desirable if the government values redistribution toward low wage workers and if unemployment induced by the minimum wage hits the lowest surplus workers first. Importantly, this result remains true in the presence of optimal nonlinear taxes and transfers. In th...
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作者:Hainz, Christa; Hakenes, Hendrik
作者单位:University of Bonn; Max Planck Society; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut
摘要:Politicians should spend money as efficiently as possible. But what is the best method of granting state aid to firms? We use a theoretical model with firms that differ in their success probabilities and compare different types of direct subsidies with indirect subsidies through bank loans. We find that, for a large range of parameters, subsidies through banks entail higher social welfare than direct subsidies, avoiding windfall gains to entrepreneurs and economizing on screening costs. For se...
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作者:Baicker, Katherine; Clemens, Jeffrey; Singhal, Monica
作者单位:Harvard University; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要:One of the most dramatic changes in the fiscal federalism landscape during the postwar period has been the rapid growth in state budgets, which almost tripled as a share of GDP and doubled as a share of government spending between 1952 and 2006. We argue that the greater role of states cannot be easily explained by changes in Tiebout forces of fiscal competition, such as mobility and voting patterns, and are not accounted for by demographic or income trends. Rather, we demonstrate that much of...
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作者:Schwerdt, Guido; Messer, Dolores; Woessmann, Ludger; Wolter, Stefan C.
作者单位:IZA Institute Labor Economics; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Munich; University of Bern; University of Bern
摘要:lifelong learning is often promoted in aging societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average effects of the voucher program on earnings, employment, and subsequent education 1 year after treatment. But effects are heterogeneous: low-educated individuals are most likely to profit from adult educa...
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作者:Di Tella, Rafael; Galiani, Sebastian; Schargrodsky, Ernesto
作者单位:Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Washington University (WUSTL); Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
摘要:Argentina privatized most public utilities during the 1990s but re-nationalized the main water company in 2006. We study beliefs about the benefits of the privatization of water services measured immediately after the 2006 nationalization. Negative opinions about privatization prevail. We find that reality can change beliefs: people who had first-hand experience observing the investments made by the privatized company have a better opinion of water privatization (relative to other privatizatio...
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作者:Epple, Dennis; Romano, Richard; Sieg, Holger
作者单位:State University System of Florida; University of Florida; Carnegie Mellon University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Pennsylvania
摘要:We study the intergenerational conflict over the provision of public education. This conflict arises because older households without children have weaker incentives to support the provision of high quality educational services in a community than younger households with school-age children. We develop an overlapping generations model for households in a system of multiple jurisdictions. This model captures the differences in preferred policies over the life-cycle. We show that the observed in...