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作者：Mills, Gregory; Gale, William G.; Patterson, Rhiannon; Engelhardt, Gary V.; Eriksen, Michael D.; Apostolov, Emil
作者单位：ABT Associates; Brookings Institution; Syracuse University
摘要：We evaluate the first controlled field experiment on Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). Including their own contributions and matching funds, treatment group members in the Tulsa, Oklahoma program could accumulate $6750 for home purchase or $4500 for other qualified uses. Almost all treatment group members opened accounts, but many withdrew all funds for unqualified purposes. Among renters at the beginning of the experiment, the IDA increased homeownership rates after 4 years by 7-11 perc...
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作者：Eissa, Nada; Kleven, Henrik Jacobsen; Kreiner, Claus Thustrup
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Georgetown University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Copenhagen
摘要：An emerging consensus is that labor force participation is more responsive to taxes and transfers than hours worked. To understand the implications of participation responses for the welfare analysis of tax reform, this paper embeds this margin of labor supply in an explicit welfare theoretic framework. We apply the framework to examine the welfare effects on single mothers in the United States following four tax acts passed in 1986, 1990, 1993, and 2001. We propose a simulation method combini...
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作者：Yakita, Akira
作者单位：University of Tsukuba
摘要：Under the golden rule of public finance for public investment with a constant budget deficit/GDP ratio, we show that for the sustainability of government budget deficits there is a threshold of the initial public debt for a given stock of public capital, and that this threshold level of public debt is increasing in the stock of public capital. If the initial public debt is greater than the threshold, the government can no longer sustain budget deficits, while if it is smaller, the government c...
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作者：Bordignon, Massimo; Colombo, Luca; Galmarini, Umberto
作者单位：Catholic University of the Sacred Heart; University of Insubria
摘要：Which government functions should be decentralized (resp. centralized) once lobbying behavior is taken into account? We find that the answer largely depends on how the interests of the regional lobbies are positioned with respect to the function to be decentralized (resp. centralized). When regional lobbies have conflicting interests, then lobbying is less damaging for social welfare under centralization than under decentralization. On the contrary, when regional lobbies have aligned interests...
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作者：Bowles, Samuel; Hwang, Sung-Ha
作者单位：The Santa Fe Institute; University of Siena; University of Massachusetts System; University of Massachusetts Amherst
摘要：Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other evidence indicates that conventional economic incentives and social preferences may be either complements or substitutes, explicit incentives crowding in or crowding out social preferences. We investig...
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作者：Gurgand, Marc; Margolis, David N.
作者单位：Paris School of Economics; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; ENSAE Paris; Paris School of Economics; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
摘要：This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary incentives for employment among welfare recipients. Based on the estimated joint distribution of wages and hours potentially offered to each individual, we compute potential gains from working in a very detailed manner. Relating these gains to observed employment, we then estimate a simple structural labor supply model. We find that potential gai...
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作者：Berentsen, Aleksander; Bruegger, Esther; Loertscher, Simon
作者单位：University of Melbourne; University of Basel
摘要：We consider an economy with uncertainty about the true production function for a public good. By using Bayes rule the economy can learn from experience. We show that it may learn the truth, but that it may also converge to an inefficient policy where no further inference is possible so that the economy is stuck in an information trap. We also show that our results are robust with respect to small experimentation. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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作者：Epple, Dennis; Ferreyra, Maria Marta
作者单位：National Bureau of Economic Research; Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：In 1994 the state of Michigan implemented one of the most comprehensive school finance reforms undertaken to date in any of the states. Understanding the effects of the reform is thus of value in informing other potential reform initiatives. In addition, the reform and associated changes in the economic environment provide an opportunity to assess whether a simple general equilibrium model can be of value in framing the study of such reform initiatives. In this paper, we present and use such a...
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作者：Doyle, Joseph J., Jr.; Samphantharak, Krislert
作者单位：Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California San Diego
摘要：There are surprisingly few estimates of the effects of sales taxes on retail prices, especially at the firm level. We consider the temporary suspension, and subsequent reinstatement, of the gasoline sales tax in Illinois and Indiana following a price spike in 2000. Earlier laws set the timing of the reinstatements, providing plausibly exogenous changes in the tax rates. Using a unique dataset of daily prices at the gas-station level, 70% of the tax suspension is passed on to consumers in the f...
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作者：Leeper, Eric M.; Yang, Shu-Chun Susan
作者单位：Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; National Bureau of Economic Research; Academia Sinica - Taiwan
摘要：Neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor income tax rates are expansionary when lump-sum transfers are used to balance the government budget. This paper explores the consequences of bond-financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies, including future government consumption, capital tax rates, or labor tax rates. Through the resulting intertemporal distortions, current tax cuts can be expansionary or contractionary. The paper also...
