Journal of Public Economics最新文献

The prevailing view in the economic literature is that voters are particularly myopic, encouraging governments to leverage short-term re-election strategies. Under such conditions, public capital investment with long-term rewards – despite its central role in the process of sustained economic development – may be neglected. In the context of India’s rural road construction programme, this study evaluates the role which large-scale public infrastructure initiatives have on the electoral accountability mechanism. Using a $fuzzy$ regression discontinuity design with newly-digitised village-level voting outcomes from the 2014 general election, the results provide evidence of electoral support attributed to the political alliance which spearheaded the programme. This support is sustained over two electoral cycles, with significant spillover effects in villages within 2 km of a newly built road.

In 2014, the Swiss Upper House switched from voting by show of hands to an electronic voting system, where individual decisions on specific exogenously defined vote types are published automatically. We leverage this update in monitoring technology for select votes to identify the impact of monitoring on politicians’ attendance within a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology. Relying on video recordings of all sessions of the 49th Upper House legislature (2011–2015), we determine pre- and post-reform attendance rates during all votes and compare the change in attendance between votes affected and unaffected by the reform. Monitoring has a positive and significant effect on attendance particularly among legislators running for reelection, as compared to those retiring at the end of the term.

We study how economic information diffuses within the household, leveraging an information-provision experiment with a representative sample of households from Germany. A random sample of household members received information about their household’s position in the income distribution. When provided with information directly, there are no gender differences in how individuals update their beliefs. However, we observe significant gender disparities in the diffusion of information within the household. Specifically, when only the husband receives the information, it influences the wife’s beliefs; however, when only the wife receives the information, it does not affect the husband’s beliefs.

This paper studies the price and employment responses of firms to the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage in Germany. Widely throughout the economy, affected firms responded by rapidly and frequently increasing prices without cutting employment. These decisions are strongly interrelated: Firms that increased prices relatively more often also showed a less negative employment response. The relative importance of both margins is associated with product market competition and the specific economic situation firms face when being treated. The empirically strong interdependence suggests that the employment effects of minimum wages may not be properly understood when abstracting from other adjustment margins.

Globally, renewable energy projects often face local opposition despite the potential for job creation. Analyzing data from over 3,900 Spanish municipalities (2017–2021), we find that new jobs frequently do not remain in the host communities. Solar projects show stronger employment and unemployment multipliers compared to wind, reflecting differing task and skill requirements. Beyond the labor market impacts, residents benefit from the investments through greater public spending and increased per capita income. However, these effects are modest, particularly in the case of small to medium-sized plants.

We derive the optimal joint-income tax schedule for couples, focusing on the distinction between interpersonal and inter-household inequality. Households are composed of two spouses with possibly unequal access to the family’s economic resources. Individual-oriented utilitarianism typically leads to a misalignment between the households’ and the government’s objectives, a phenomenon termed dissonance by Apps and Rees (1988). The traditional ABC formula must be amended by including a Pigouvian term to correct for dissonance. Under general conditions, the effect of dissonance on marginal taxes is ambiguous; its sign depends on whether the less powerful spouse’s marginal contribution to household earnings is less than, or greater than, her marginal entitlement to household consumption. Assuming identical iso-elastic preferences, the multidimensional heterogeneity collapses into a single-dimensional index, preserving the single-crossing property. This simplification enables us to solve (Mirrlees, 1971)’s multidimensional program and quantitatively assess the size and sign of the Pigouvian term, which is positive across all income levels, leading to higher marginal tax rates.

This study explores the relationship between women’s economic empowerment and intimate partner violence (IPV), measured as women’s hospital visits for assault. Using longitudinal Swedish administrative data, I proxy women’s economic empowerment with a measure of potential relative earnings of married spouses caused by local changes in gender-specific labour demand. The findings reveal that an increase in potential relative earnings increases the probability of women’s hospital visits for injuries caused by assault, and the effect is particularly pronounced for women with low baseline bargaining power. Furthermore, exploiting detailed information on type of hospital visit, diagnosis and medical actions taken at the hospital, I show that the increase in hospital visits for assault is, at least in part, driven by an increase in care-seeking for IPV-related injuries rather than an increase in IPV itself.

Previous studies of optimal default options demonstrate that either opt-out minimization or maximization is optimal under restrictive conditions. We obtain a general characterization of the solution by studying optimal defaults when one of the problem’s parameters approaches a limiting value. We interpret these “asymptotic optima” as approximate optima for non-limiting cases and justify this interpretation through numerical simulations. When the designer and choosers agree about the activity’s value, simple forms of weighted opt-out minimization are asymptotically optimal. Additional results encompass Pigouvian fees, normative ambiguity, and cases in which the designer and choosers disagree about the activity’s value.

We study the determinants of local governments’ reliance on bank loans using granular data from the Federal Reserve. Governments that are larger, riskier, rely on historically stable revenue sources, or have higher spending relative to revenues are more likely to borrow from banks. Declines in revenues, reductions in bond market access, and relationships with financial advisers and underwriters all strongly predict higher bank loan reliance. While resemblance between bank loans and bonds is limited, loans afford governments significant financial flexibility not otherwise available in the municipal bond market. The frequent loan renegotiation and credit line use are both highly responsive to changes in credit quality, thereby tailoring debt contracts to changes in government fundamentals. The largest entities find this flexibility most useful with nearly 45% of entities in the top revenue quintile obtaining a bank loan by 2017.

Many papers report a negative association between parental divorce and child outcomes. To provide evidence whether this correlation is causal, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the extent of gender balance in fathers’ workplaces. Fathers who encounter more women in their relevant age–occupation–group at work are more likely to divorce. This result is conditional on the overall proportion of female employees in a firm and on detailed industry affiliation. Parental divorce has persistent, and mostly negative effects on children that differ between boys and girls. Treated boys have lower levels of educational attainment, worse labor market outcomes and are more likely to die early. Treated girls also have lower levels of educational attainment, but they are also more likely to have children at an early age (especially in their teens). However, treated girls lose less in terms of employment. This could be a direct consequence of teenage motherhood, which initiates early entry into the labor market.