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作者：Di Tella, Rafael; Dubra, Juan
作者单位：Harvard University; Universidad de Montevideo
摘要：We observe that countries where belief in the American dream(i.e., effort pays) prevails also set harsher punishment for criminals. We know that beliefs are also correlated with several features of the economic system (taxation, social insurance, etc). Our objective is to study the joint determination of these three features (beliefs, punitiveness and economic system) in a way that replicates the observed empirical patterns. We present a model where beliefs determine the types of contracts tha...
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作者：Krysiak, Frank C.
作者单位：University of Basel
摘要：It is well-known that price- and quantity-based regulation approaches provide different investment incentives. But usually, only the effect on the level of investment is studied. In this paper, we show that under uncertainty, they also lead to the adoption of different technologies due to the disparate risks that a regulated firm is exposed to. Different regulatory instruments induce different technologies and this effect cannot be compensated by varying the design of the instruments. Furtherm...
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作者：Alesina, Alberto; Tabellini, Guido
作者单位：Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates first the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non-elected bureaucrats. Politicians are preferable if there is uncertainty about social preferences and flexibility is valuable, or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is important. Bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short-termism is an issue, or if vested interests h...
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作者：Corneo, Giacomo; Fong, Christina M.
作者单位：Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; IZA Institute Labor Economics; Free University of Berlin; Carnegie Mellon University
摘要：This paper proposes a model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice, defined as distribution according to desert. We derive a formula that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from fiscal data and the estimated coefficients of a probit regression. Using this formula and data from a 1998 Gallup Social Audit, we find that on average the monetary value of justice for US households amounts to about one fifth of their disp...
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作者：Gustavsson, Magnus; Jordahl, Henrik
作者单位：Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN); Uppsala University
摘要：We present new evidence on the influence of income inequality on generalized trust. Using individual panel data from Swedish counties together with an instrumental variable strategy, we find that differences in disposable income, and especially differences among people in the bottom half of the income distribution, are associated with lower trust. The relationship between income inequality and trust is particularly strong for people with a strong aversion against income differentials. We also ...
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作者：Konow, James; Earley, Joseph
作者单位：Loyola Marymount University
摘要：The Hedonistic Paradox states that homo economicus, or someone who seeks happiness for him- or herself, will not find it, but the person who helps others will. This study examines two questions in connection with happiness and generosity. First, do more generous people, as identified in dictator experiments, report on average greater happiness, or subjective well-being (SVM), as measured by responses to various questionnaires? Second, if the answer is affirmative, what is the causal relationsh...
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作者：Kyyra, Tomi; Ollikainen, Virve
作者单位：VATT Institute for Economic Research
摘要：In Finland the older unemployed can collect unemployment insurance benefits until retirement, while the entitlement period for younger groups is two years. In 1997 the eligibility age of persons benefiting from extended benefits was raised from 53 to 55. This paper takes advantage of this quasi-experimental setting to identify the effect of extended benefits on transitions out of unemployment among the older unemployed. We apply a competing risks version of a split population duration model to...
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作者：Keely, Louise C.; Tan, Chill Ming
作者单位：Tufts University; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
摘要：Recent research suggests that income redistribution preferences vary across identity groups. We employ statistical learning methods that emphasize pattern recognition; classification and regression trees (CART (TM)) and random forests (RandomForests (TM)) to uncover what these groups are. Using data from the General Social Survey, we find that, out of a large set of identity markers only race, gender, age, and socioeconomic class are important classifiers for income redistribution preferences....
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作者：Greenberg, David H.; Robins, Philip K.
作者单位：University of Miami
摘要：Benefit-cost analysis is used extensively in the evaluation of social programs. Often, the success or failure of these programs is judged on the basis of whether the calculated net benefits to society are positive or negative. Almost all existing benefit-cost studies of social programs count entire increases in income accruing to participants in a social program as net benefits to society. However, economic theory implies that the conceptually appropriate measure of the impact of a government ...
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作者：Conconi, Paola; Perroni, Carlo; Riezman, Raymond
作者单位：Universite Libre de Bruxelles; University of Warwick; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Iowa
摘要：We consider a setting in which capital taxation is characterized by two distortions working in opposite directions. On one hand, governments engage in tax competition and are tempted to lower capital tax rates. On the other hand, they are unable to commit to future policies and, once capital has been installed, have incentives to increase taxes. In this setting, there exists a tax that optimally trades off the two distortions. We compare three possible tax harmonization scenarios: no tax harmo...
