Journal of Public Economics最新文献

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.

We study labor market and health implications of asylum wait time, a policy margin with bearing on public finances. The analysis exploits a rapid and unexpected increase in pending applications, which extended processing times with several months for new asylum seekers to Sweden. Longer waiting slows down integration by delaying labor market entry and decreasing participation and performance in active policy measures. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after application are 2.6 percent lower per added month of waiting. The impact is due to delay, not to negative human capital effects of waiting per se. There is no evidence of detrimental effects on psychiatric or other forms of health. Importantly, our results suggest that asylum seekers in Sweden can use the waiting time for useful preparations. The analysis consistently indicates that case workers, teachers and employers involved in post-asylum integration measures perceive individuals who have waited longer as more prepared.

Recreational marijuana laws (RMLs), which legalize the sale and possession of small quantities of marijuana for recreational use, have been adopted by 24 states and the District of Columbia. Using a generalized difference-in-differences approach and data for the period 2000–2019 from a variety of sources (the National Survey of Drug Use and Health, the Uniform Crime Reports, the Treatment Episode Data Set, and the National Vital Statistics Mortality files), this study comprehensively examines the effects of legalizing recreational marijuana on drug use, crime, and admissions to substance use treatment facilities. Our analyses show that RML adoption increases the use of marijuana by adults and reduces marijuana-related arrests. However, we find little evidence that RMLs increase the use of harder drugs, admissions to substance use treatment facilities, or property and violent crime. In fact, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that marijuana and opioids are substitutes.

Policymakers routinely make high-stakes funding decisions. Assessing the value of a program is difficult and may be affected by bounded rationality. We conducted experiments involving U.S. policymakers and the general public, in which participants were given the opportunity to assess the value of various policy programs. Our findings demonstrate that decision aids enhance the responsiveness of respondents to the impact of the programs. We designed and tested two portable decision aids—one that compares programs side-by-side and another that aggregates multiple features of impact into a single metric. The two decision aids increase the elasticity of assessments of program value with respect to impact by 0.20 on a base of 0.33 among policymakers and by 0.21 on a base of 0.21 among the general public. We provide evidence that the cognitive difficulty of translating impact-relevant information into policy decisions helps explain our findings.

Using a random audit program covering more than 17,000 tax returns, I study how tax audits affect the subsequent compliance behavior of self-employed with varying intentions to comply. Leveraging novel information provided by auditors on taxpayers’ perceived willingness to comply, I find that unintentional non-compliers, driven by inattention or misunderstandings of the tax rules, exhibit higher compliance in subsequent years. This results in a revenue increase equivalent to 340% of the tax uncovered from the audit after 5 years. In contrast, intentional non-compliers who deliberately evade taxes and are typically targeted for operational audits do not respond to audits and have a low recovery rate for evaded taxes. Based on these findings, I illustrate how risk scores derived from pre-audit information can be used to target taxpayers expected to respond strongly to audits, leading to increased revenue gains of 87% compared to an approach that focuses on initial revenue from audits. Finally, I propose targeted and personalized guidance as a cheaper alternative to mitigate unintentional misreporting compared to expensive audits.

There is a strong and growing interest in helping families move to areas with higher economic opportunity. We exploit variation in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to examine how increasing household income affects migration, with a focus on women from rural and economically distressed areas. We find that higher income increases migration out of rural and distressed areas—primarily among unmarried mothers—to areas with higher employment and earnings, and lower unemployment rates. Many of these moves occur across counties or commuting zones, but we find no effect on moving across states. We also find decreases in living “doubled up” with another family, and reductions in commute length. We are the first to show that the EITC helps women move to economic opportunity, with the most likely mechanism being relaxing household financial constraints.