Journal of Public Economics Plus最新文献

This article investigates how the design of the tax system affects tax revenue when avoidance is legal. Between 1952 and 1995, the Swedish church tax was constructed as an opt-out system: Swedish citizens were automatically enrolled in the church at birth but were free to opt out. I compare children born shortly before and after the system’s discontinuation and find that birth memberships significantly affect church tax payments later in life. The baseline estimates imply that changing from an opt-out to an opt-in system reduced church tax revenue by 8.2 percent. The default effects are significant on the full population but are especially strong among individuals born in low-income households, implying the opt-out system made the church tax more regressive. I find no evidence that the default option affected religious socialization: reform-affected individuals are equally likely to baptize their children and equally likely to join a different congregation.

Teachers are a fundamental input for classroom learning. Consequently, teacher development is a policy priority for governments around the world. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of “Let’s All Learn to Read,” a curricular reform implemented via a one-year professional development program that trained and coached first-grade teachers throughout the school year and provided them and their students with structured materials. Following a year of instruction by trained teachers, students’ literacy scores in treated schools grew by 0.39 of a standard deviation compared to students in the control group. These gains persisted after the intervention finished; through the second and third grades.

I examine a policy-making game among countries that must choose both a policy instrument (e.g., a tax or a quota) and its intensity (i.e., the tax rate or the quota level) to price pollution. When countries price pollution non-cooperatively, they not only set the intensity inefficiently, they are also likely to adopt Pigouvian fees, despite quotas being better from a welfare perspective. Adopting a Pigouvian fee to address a multi-country externality generates a risk externality, and in some cases non-cooperatively chosen quotas can generate higher social welfare than maximum social welfare Pigouvian fees can deliver.

We study the impact on young children’s bodyweight of switching from means-tested to universal provision of nutritious free school meals in England, exploiting identifying variation in the timing of weight measurements. We show that exposure to high quality universal free lunches increases healthy weight prevalence and reduces obesity prevalence and BMI by the end of the first year of school. The effect seems driven by substitution of home-produced lunches with school meals among children not eligible under means-testing, with little evidence of income or parental labour supply effects. This suggests universal provision can improve the diets of relatively well-off pupils.

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality – teacher–child interactions – that researchers in education and psychology have argued is critical for child development and learning. We implemented the coaching program in Ecuador, with 100 1st grade teachers randomly assigned to treatment and 100 to control. Coaching improved the quality of teacher–child interactions but reduced child achievement. Our results underline the importance of evaluating new forms of professional development for teachers, even those that follow best practice, before these interventions are taken to scale.

MPCs were directly elicited from a representative sample of UK adults in July 2020 using receipt of a hypothetical unanticipated, one-time income payment. Reported MPCs are modest, around 11% on average. They are higher, but still modest, for individuals in households with high current needs. Significant fractions of respondents report they would use a windfall to pay down debt, or that they would change their transfer payments to or from family and friends. The latter means that the aggregate MPC out of a stimulus payment need not equal the population-average MPC.

We study the role of cognitive ability for individuals’ tax responsiveness using linked administrative tax and military enlistment registers. Our main finding is that individuals in the top decile of the ability distribution react twice as strong to a large and salient kink point in the Swedish tax code as compared to the average individual, and three times as strong as individuals in the bottom ability decile. This ability gradient is mainly driven by income shifting among high-ability owners of incorporated businesses, but we also find evidence of labor-supply responses among high-ability wage earners.

This paper develops a sufficient-statistic formula for the unemployment gap—the difference between the actual unemployment rate and the efficient unemployment rate. While lowering unemployment puts more people into work, it forces firms to post more vacancies and to devote more resources to recruiting. This unemployment-vacancy tradeoff, governed by the Beveridge curve, determines the efficient unemployment rate. Accordingly, the unemployment gap can be measured from three sufficient statistics: elasticity of the Beveridge curve, social cost of unemployment, and cost of recruiting. Applying this formula to the United States, 1951–2019, we find that the efficient unemployment rate averages 4.3%, always remains between 3.0% and 5.4%, and has been stable between 3.8% and 4.6% since 1990. As a result, the unemployment gap is countercyclical, reaching 6 percentage points in slumps. The US labor market is therefore generally inefficient and especially inefficiently slack in slumps. In turn, the unemployment gap is a crucial statistic to design labor-market and macroeconomic policies.

Most evidence on the effects of policies to promote child development refers to pilot programs implemented under tightly-controlled circumstances. We provide novel evidence on the effects of home visiting delivered at scale. The program we study, Cuna Mas in Peru, was started from scratch in 2012 and, within 3 years, was delivering weekly home visits to over 67,000 children in rural areas. Identification comes from random assignment of municipalities to treatment and control conditions. We show that, after approximately 2 years, children randomly assigned to treatment have child development scores that are 0.10 standard deviations higher than those assigned to control. The estimated benefit–cost ratio of the intervention is 5.4.