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作者：Mastrobuoni, Giovanni
摘要：In response to a crisis in Social Security financing two decades ago Congress implemented an increase in the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) of 2 months per year for cohorts born in 1938 and after. These cohorts began reaching retirement age in 2000. This paper studies the effects of these benefit cuts on recent retirement behavior. The evidence suggests that the mean retirement age of the affected cohorts has increased by about half as much as the increase in the NRA. If older workers continue to...
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作者：Slemrod, Joel; Wilson, John D.
作者单位：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Michigan State University
摘要：We develop a tax competition framework in which some jurisdictions, called tax havens, are parasitic on the revenues of other countries, and these countries use resources in an attempt to limit the transfer of tax revenue from capital taxation to the havens. We demonstrate that the full or partial elimination of tax havens would improve welfare in non-haven countries. We also demonstrate that the smaller countries choose to become tax havens, and we show that the abolition of a sufficiently sm...
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作者：Cotton, Christopher
作者单位：University of Miami
摘要：This paper develops a model of political contributions in which a politician can either sell policy favors, or sell access. Access allows interest groups to share hard information with the politician in support of their preferred policy. Here selling access maximizes policy utility, while selling policy favors maximizes total contributions. Imposing a binding contribution limit makes it more likely that the politician sells access, which can improve expected constituent welfare. However, a con...
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作者：Olken, Benjamin A.
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This paper examines the accuracy of corruption perceptions by comparing Indonesian villagers' reported perceptions about corruption in a road-building project in their village with a more objective measure of 'missing expenditures' in the project. I find that villagers' reported perceptions do contain real information, and that villagers are sophisticated enough to distinguish between corruption in a particular road project and general corruption in the village. The magnitude of the reported i...
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作者：Ananat, Elizabeth Oltmans; Washington, Ebonya
作者单位：Yale University; Duke University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：The impact of segregation on Black political efficacy is theoretically ambiguous. On one hand, increased contact among Blacks in more segregated areas may mean that Blacks are better able to coordinate political behavior. On the other hand, lesser contact with non-Blacks may mean that Blacks have less political influence over voters of other races. As for non-Blacks, inter-group conflict theory suggests that greater contact yields greater conflict between the groups while inter-group contact t...
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作者：Bierbrauer, Felix
作者单位：Max Planck Society
摘要：This paper extends the model of optimal income taxation due to Mirrlees (Mirrlees. J, 1971. An exploration in the theory of optimum income taxation. Review of Economic Studies 38, 175-208) and includes private information on public goods preferences. A mechanism design approach is used to establish the following result: If policies are required to be robustly implementable in the sense of Bergemann and Morris (Bergemann, D., Morris, S., 2005. Robust mechanism design. Econometrica 73, 1771-1813...
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作者：Gans, Joshua S.; Leigh, Andrew
作者单位：University of Melbourne; Australian National University
摘要：It is well understood that government policies can distort behavior. But what is less often recognized is that the anticipated introduction of a policy can introduce its own distortions. We study one such introduction effect, using evidence from a unique policy change in Australia. in 2004, the Australian government announced that children born on or after July 1, 2004 would receive a $3000 Baby Bonus. Although the policy was only announced seven weeks before its introduction, parents appear t...
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作者：Chiang, Hanley
作者单位：Mathematica
摘要：Although an emerging body of evidence has shown that the threat of sanctions on low-performing schools can raise student test scores in the short run, the extent to which these test score improvements are due to schools' manipulation of the accountability system has remained uncertain. in this paper, I provide two new strands of evidence to evaluate the relative importance of educational reforms and gaming behavior in generating test score gains by threatened schools. First, using a regression...
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作者：Luechinger, Simon; Raschky, Paul A.
作者单位：University of Zurich; University of Innsbruck
摘要：This paper argues that life satisfaction data can be used to value natural disasters. We discuss the strengths of this approach, compare it to traditional methods and apply it to estimate and monetize utility losses Caused by floods in 16 European Countries between 1973 and 1998. Using combined cross-section and time-series data, we find a negative impact of floods on life satisfaction that is sizeable, robust and significant. The estimates are comparable to price discounts found in housing ma...
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作者：Curry, Philip A.; Klumpp, Tilman
作者单位：Emory University; Simon Fraser University
摘要：We examine the link between the penalties used to punish convicted criminals and judicial prejudice against defendants. In our model, agents choose to commit crimes if their privately observed utility from doing so is high enough. A crime generates noisy evidence, and defendants are convicted when the realized amount of evidence is sufficiently strong to establish the probability of guilt beyond a fixed threshold. We show that if convicted offenders are incarcerated, poorer individuals face a ...
