Journal of Public Economics最新文献

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.

This paper analyzes ordinal rank across cognitive and physical ability within an initial job training program. Using a rich administrative dataset and conditional random assignment of trainees to peer groups, we test whether rank effects vary across contemporaneous training and long-term career outcomes. We find cognitive ordinal rank, measured by an individual’s score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), has a meaningful impact on completing initial training into the U.S. Air Force (USAF). This ranking also affects occupational specialization for trainees that arrive without a preassigned occupation. We also show physical ordinal rank, measured by an individual’s initial fitness score, affects job training performance. Both sets of ranking effects impact behavioral misconduct outcomes and vary by gender. Finally, the interaction between cognitive and physical ordinal ranking has multiplicative effects on a limited set of outcomes.

We build the first news-based index of US environmental and climate policy and examine how it relates to clean investments. Extracting text from ten leading US newspapers over the last four decades, we use text-mining techniques to develop a granular news index of US environmental and climate policy (EnvP) over the 1981–2019 period. Furthermore, we develop a set of additional measures, namely an index of sentiment on environmental policy, as well as various topic-specific indexes. We validate our index by showing that it correctly captures trends and peaks in the evolution of US environmental and climate policy and that it has a meaningful association with clean investments, in line with environmental regulations supporting growing opportunities for clean markets. In firm-level estimations, we find that our index is associated with a greater probability of receiving venture capital (VC) funding for cleantech startups and reduced stock returns for high-emissions firms most exposed to environmental regulations. At the aggregate level, we find in VAR models that a shock in our news-based index of renewable energy policy is associated with an increase in the number of clean energy VC deals and in the assets under management of a benchmark clean energy exchange-traded fund.

This paper estimates how public pensions affect retirement timing by examining the Railroad Retirement Act of 1937, which replaced private railroad pensions with a national program comparable in many ways to Social Security. Leveraging linked decennial census records between 1910–1940, the first part of the analysis compares male labor force nonparticipation in 1940 relative to 1930, between workers previously in railroad versus other industries with broad pension coverage, and by age. Higher benefits led to earlier retirement, largely driven by exit at age 65. The second part of my analysis also exploits the switch from flat to progressive benefits in average wages to estimate the elasticity of nonparticipation with respect to benefits for men aged 65-69. My central estimate of 0.55 indicates a large retirement response. Application of these estimates to Social Security expansions in the 1950s suggests rising benefits was the key driver of earlier retirement among the already-insured male population during this era.

This paper uses a reform to Chile’s school choice system to study student socioeconomic segregation with a focus on student demand and school selectivity. The reform increases the subsidies that schools receive for low socioeconomic status students. I exploit this shock to schools’ incentives to test for selection at admission based on students’ socioeconomic characteristics. Schools respond to the new voucher by decreasing the level of cream-skimming. I incorporate these admission restrictions in a demand model to estimate parents’ preferences for school and peer characteristics. I show that ignoring admission restrictions leads to underestimating poor parents’ preferences for school quality. Counterfactual simulations show that preferences of high-SES parents for high-SES peers are one of the main drivers behind segregation as opposed to schools’ selective behavior. This likely explains the unexpected increase in enrollment for schools that opted out of the reform and the ineffectiveness of the reform in reducing socioeconomic segregation across schools.

This paper studies whether and how religious leaders affect politics. Focusing on Italian dioceses in the period from 1948 to 1992, we find that the identity of the bishop in office explains a significant amount of the variation in the vote share for the Christian Democracy party (DC). This result is robust to several exercises that use different samples and time windows. Zooming into the mechanism, we find that two characteristics of bishops matter: (i) his political culture, and (ii) his interaction with the population—the latter being measured using text-analysis techniques.