Journal of Public Economics最新文献

Economic inequality may affect a wide range of societal outcomes, for example crime rates, economic growth, and political polarization. In this paper we discuss how to model such effects in welfarist frameworks. Our main suggestion is to treat economic inequality itself as an externality, which has wide-ranging implications for classical economic theory. We show this through the Mirrlees (1971) optimal non-linear income taxation model, where we focus on a post-tax income inequality externality. Optimal top marginal tax rates are particularly affected by the externality, implying a novel equality dimension to optimal top tax rate design. We propose that inequality’s externality properties may have larger optimal top tax rate implications than standard revenue concerns; our model thus provides a theoretical basis for real-world governmental tax choices that seem irrational under standard optimal taxation models. We also show that the total inequality aversion implied by the current U.S. tax system is insufficient to accommodate both social welfare weights that are decreasing in income and a significant concern for inequality’s externality effects.

We report on a large-scale urban resettlement program in Uruguay. Under the program, thousands of low- to middle-income households were randomly assigned over the course of seven years to ownership of apartments in new buildings in more central areas and received a subsidy averaging $44,000 per household. We match applicants to comprehensive administrative data on employment, schooling, fertility, and voting over the decade after the move. We find that the program led to a small decline in fertility for women and a two-percentage-point increase in formal employment but did not affect school attendance. The relocation program did not result in transformative improvements in the lives of its beneficiaries, likely because of its minimum income requirements and the lack of strong spatial inequality in Uruguay.

Many claimants of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) retain legal representation to help with the approval process. The Social Security Administration imposes strict rules on representative compensation. Representatives are only paid if claimants are awarded disability, and they are paid the lesser of 25 percent of the claimant’s past due benefits or a pre-specified maximum fee ($7,200 since 2022). Because past due benefits are a function of the number of months claimants wait to be awarded, representatives face incentives to delay case resolution until past due benefits push the representative fees past the fee ceiling. We use difference-in-differences to evaluate how these incentives impact SSDI claimant wait times. After the fee ceiling increased in 2002, average wait times increased by 0.85 months among claimants for whom the fee threshold is more binding, implying a 2.6–5.6 month increase for claimants with representatives. This indicates that the structure of representative compensation does matter for case outcomes, and highlights the importance of interactions with auxiliary agents so common in modern social programs.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sparked the most profound transformation of the landscape of abortion access in 50 years. We provide the first estimates of the effects of near-total abortion bans on fertility using a pre-registered synthetic difference-in-differences design applied to newly released provisional natality data for the first half of 2023. The results indicate that states with abortion bans experienced an average increase in births of 2.3 percent relative to if no bans had been enforced.

Blind adoption of opinions put forward by political parties and influential figures can sometimes be harmful. Focusing on cases where the partisan gap on policy support has not yet arisen, we investigate whether its formation can be prevented by encouraging prior active engagement with non-partisan information. To address this question, we recruited N=851 Republicans for a study about net neutrality, an issue largely unfamiliar to the electorate, which refers to equal treatment of all internet traffic. In a pre-registered experiment, we randomly changed the order in which the following two types of information were provided: (i) partisan, underscoring Republicans’ opposition and Democrats’ support, and (ii) non-partisan, where the participants evaluated factual arguments about the pros and cons of the policy. Despite holding total information constant, we find that those who saw the non-partisan block first donated 46% more to a charity advocating for net neutrality (p=0.001). The treatment effect persisted in an obfuscated follow-up study, conducted several weeks after the intervention. However, we do not find an effect on donations when repeating the main study with a sample of Democrats.

Building energy efficiency has been a cornerstone of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies for decades. However, impact evaluations have revealed that energy savings typically fall short of engineering model forecasts that currently guide funding decisions. This creates a resource allocation problem that impedes progress on climate change. Using data from the Illinois implementation of the U.S.’s largest energy efficiency program, we demonstrate that a data-driven approach to predicting retrofit impacts based on previously realized outcomes is more accurate than the status quo engineering models. Targeting high-return interventions based on these predictions dramatically increases net social benefits, from $0.93 to $1.23 per dollar invested.

Political parties play a crucial gatekeeping role in elections, including controlling electoral resources, candidate recruitment, and electoral list compositions. In making these strategic choices, parties aim to encourage candidates to invest in the campaign, while also trying to secure advantages for their preferred candidates. We study how parties navigate this trade-off using a specific feature of the Norwegian local electoral system in which parties can give advantaged positions to some candidates in an otherwise open list. Our theory reveals that parties’ ex-ante electoral strength impacts their strategic decisions. Notably, the trade-off is weaker for more popular parties, allowing them to facilitate the election of their preferred candidates without compromising the party’s overall performance. We show empirically that the moral hazard concern is real, and that larger parties are indeed more likely to use their power to make some candidates safe. The advantage of large parties extends further: safeguarding specific candidates enables parties to achieve disproportionately favorable outcomes in post-electoral bargaining. These findings reveal new insights for political representations, policy outcomes, and intra-party dynamics more broadly.

A flourishing literature quantifies the corporate tax revenue losses from multinational profit shifting to low-tax economies. Other consequences of international tax avoidance have received little attention. In this paper, we empirically assess the widespread perception that international tax avoidance impacts product market outcomes and can put national competitors of multinational firms at a competitive disadvantage. The empirical identification strategy relies on changes in transfer pricing regulations that constrain multinational profit shifting by strategic mis-pricing of intra-firm trade. Based on rich data on firms in European high-tax countries, we show that tighter transfer pricing provisions raise multinational firms’ effective tax costs and lower their sales. The sales and profits of affected firms’ national competitors increase significantly, while mark-ups remain largely unchanged. We discuss policy implications of our findings.

We provide experimental evidence from an education program in Brazil that empowers public school teachers, through a combination of technical assistance and earmarked funding, to design and introduce locally adapted pedagogical innovations. While the study encompasses grades 5, 6, and 10, we find consistent and pronounced impacts on learning and school progression in 6th grade, a critical transition year from primary to lower-secondary education. Positive effects are concentrated in schools where teachers are most affected and where the rate of in-school project implementation was highest. We argue that program components are likely complementary and that education projects designed to tackle multiple constraints simultaneously can improve service delivery and child outcomes.

We use geographically precise longitudinal employment data documenting worker job-to-job mobility to study policy spillovers in the context of three local minimum wage increases. Estimated spillover impacts on wages and hours are statistically significant, geographically diffuse, and sufficient to create concern regarding interpretation of results even using not-immediately-adjacent regions as controls. Spillover effects appear less concerning with smaller interventions or those adopted in smaller jurisdictions. The boundary discontinuity method of causal inference may yield misleading results if a policy’s impacts do not stop at the border of the implementing jurisdiction.