Journal of Public Economics最新文献

How freely can local jurisdictions change their taxes and spending? I propose an empirical test of the effective degree of municipal fiscal autonomy by studying fiscal adjustments to a permanent exogenous revenue shift. Based on a tax competition model where jurisdictions are partially expenditure constrained, I derive a testable prediction: tax cuts from a small positive revenue shock will be larger (smaller) with higher perceived tax base mobility, if the local policymaker is strongly (weakly) fiscally constrained. I apply this test using a revenue shock generated by a reform in an inter-municipal transfer system within a Swiss canton. tax base mobility is proxied by the availability of zoned land reserves. I find that higher residential land availability is associated with stronger tax rate responses, but I find no statistically significant results for industrial land reserves. In light of the theory, this suggests that the effective degree of fiscal autonomy of local jurisdictions is low. Usual indicators of fiscal decentralization based on public accounts might overestimate the actual autonomy of local governments.

We use information on people’s ideal, predicted, and realized body weight to classify them as time-consistent versus naïve, and partially or fully sophisticated regarding their self-control limitations. Operationalizing this approach in population-representative data reveals that self-control problems are pervasive and that most people are at least partly aware of their limited self-control. Compared to naïfs, sophisticates have higher IQs, better educated parents, and are more likely to use potential commitment devices. Despite their self-control problems, sophisticated individuals make similar choices as time-consistent individuals when those choices involve immediate costs and later benefits. An increased awareness of one’s own self-control limitations may thus help in reducing their adverse consequences.

We study several key aspects of the design of parental leave systems. First, we estimate parents’ willingness to pay for parental leave using Danish administrative data on the division of leave from almost 190,000 births combined with sharp variation in economic incentives created by the parental leave benefit system. We find evidence of both strong behavioral responses with significant bunching at kink points and a willingness to pay for a gender-traditional allocation of leave, where fathers take little or no leave. Second, we provide a menu of counterfactual policy simulations showing substantial interaction effects between earmarked leave, replacement rates and the duration of leave benefits. Relevant for the implementation of a recent EU directive, a higher replacement rate significantly increases the behavioral response of fathers to earmarked leave. Finally, we discuss the welfare effects of different policies aimed at increasing the parental leave of fathers.

This paper studies the influence of pre-migration social background on the long-term economic assimilation of immigrants. I use unique French survey data to trace family histories over three generations, before and after migration. While many immigrants experience an occupational downgrading at migration, their children benefit from various characteristics associated with the high socio-economic status their family had in the origin country. As a result, characteristics of immigrant grandparents are highly predictive of their grandchildren’s educational attainment.

We provide the first evidence of the impact of 9/11 on outcomes for Muslims in the US criminal justice system. We focus on parole outcomes of Black Muslim men in the state of Georgia, and find large post-9/11 declines in the likelihood of being granted parole and a subsequent 23% relative increase in prison time for Muslim inmates. These impacts persisted for several years after 9/11 and were larger for inmates with higher levels of recidivism risk. We argue that these effects reflect unwarranted disparities driven by the decision-making of parole board members post-9/11.

We evaluate the welfare effects of the temporary job retention schemes (JRS) implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in a DSGE model with incomplete insurance and heterogeneous agents calibrated to the euro area. JRS have large favorable welfare effects and benefit all households when they are well targeted at potentially viable jobs at risk of being lost. These gains are particularly strong for liquid-asset-poor households, especially for those that are also unemployed or on furlough. The job protection component of JRS explains almost all the welfare gains they deliver, while their high level of generosity plays a minor role and has ambiguous net aggregate welfare effects. We also discuss the conditions that make JRS valuable and show that they can cause a decrease in welfare when they subsidize too many safe jobs; when they are targeted at non-viable jobs that will inevitably be lost once schemes end; and when implemented in economies where labor market frictions are low.

Australian taxpayers display a clear preference for round numbers for end-of-year tax refunds, bunching at positive and salient thresholds such as the tens, hundreds and thousands. Bunching appears to be driven by tax evasion. Data from audited returns shows that bunching is present in returns before audit, but does not persist post-audit. Tax preparers play an important role, being twice as likely to deliver positive round-number refunds as individuals who file their own tax returns. Preparers with greater propensity to bunch deliver larger refunds by lifting deductions and lowering reported income for return items where audits are costly. This highlights how bunching behaviors can help identify tax evasion, including tax preparers who facilitate it and the tax return items which are manipulated.

We use population-wide administrative health records from Taiwan to estimate intergenerational persistence in health, providing the first estimates for a middle-income country. We measure latent health by applying principal components analysis to a set of indicators for 13 broad ICD categories and quintiles of visits to a general practitioner. We find that the rank–rank slope in health between adult children and their parents is 0.22 which is broadly in line with results from other countries. Maternal transmission is stronger than paternal transmission and sons have higher persistence than daughters. Persistence is also higher at the upper tail of the parent health distribution. Persistence is lower when complete data on outpatient care is unavailable. Health transmission is almost entirely unrelated to household income levels in Taiwan. We also find that there are small geographic differences in absolute health mobility across townships and that these are modestly correlated with area-level income and doctor availability.

We investigate the effects of population ageing on immigration policies using a citizen-candidate model of elections. In each period, young people work and pay taxes while old people receive social security payments. Immigrants are all young, meaning they contribute significantly to financing the cost of public services and social security. Among natives, the elderly and the poor benefit the most from public spending. However, since these two types of voters do not internalise the positive fiscal effects of immigration, they have a common interest in supporting candidates who seek to curb immigration and increase the tax burden on high-income individuals. Population ageing increases the size and, in turn, the political power of such sociodemographic groups, resulting in more restrictive immigration policies, a larger public sector, higher tax rates, and lower societal well-being. Calibrating the model to UK data suggests that the magnitude of these effects is large. The implications of this model are shown to be consistent with the patterns observed in UK attitudinal data.

We comprehensively evaluate the role of the U.S. safety net in replacing displaced workers’ lost income and health insurance using the 1996–2013 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Cash and near-cash programs replace 32% of lost income on average over the two years following job loss and reduce the likelihood of experiencing poverty by 18 percentage points. 97% of transfer benefits paid in these two years come from Unemployment Insurance. Two years after job loss, the replacement rate is 28%, but this is largely driven by UI benefit extensions unique to the Great Recession. Public health insurance makes up for 17% of the loss in private insurance, but, even two years later, rates of uninsurance are higher than pre-job loss. Looking at heterogeneous effects, in general, the safety net is progressive, though we uncover important gaps in benefits for some disadvantaged groups.