Journal of Public Economics最新文献

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.

This paper examines the intergenerational effects of a welfare reform that increased welfare benefits generosity and eased eligibility requirements for single mothers in Israel. Using large-scale restricted administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, I find that the rise in single mothers’ welfare participation rates following the reform had a significant impact on their children’s long-term economic outcomes. Girls exposed to the reform in childhood were likelier to be on welfare themselves as young adults, while boys experienced a long-lasting increase in labor earnings. The results suggest that generous welfare programs can have beneficial consequences for boys growing up in single-parent households.

This paper studies the effect of police-involved shootings on gun violence and civilian cooperation with police, as proxied by crime reports made via 911 calls. To distinguish between crime reporting and crime incidence, we use administrative data on 911 calls and ShotSpotter data from Minneapolis. Exploiting the variation in the timing and the distance to these incidents, we show that exposure to a police shooting increases gun-related crimes by 5–6 percent, and decreases shots reported by 1–2 percent. Taken together, this implies police shootings reduce civilian crime reports to police by 6–7 percent.

We report the results of an online experiment studying preferences for giving and preferences for group-wide redistribution in small (4-person) and large (200-person) groups. We find that the desire to engage in voluntary giving decreases significantly with (perceived) group size. However, voting for group-wide redistribution is precisely estimated to not depend on group size. Moreover, people’s perceptions of what constitutes the relevant group are malleable, and affect their desire to give. These results suggest that government programs, such as progressive tax-and-transfer systems, can help satisfy other-regarding preferences for redistribution in a way that creating opportunities for voluntary giving cannot.

Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer–employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of pass-through to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.

Crime levels are a perennial development problem in Latin America and a renewed concern in the United States. At the same time, trust in the police has been falling, and questions abound about citizens’ willingness to support government efforts to fight crime. We conduct a survey experiment to elicit willingness to contribute toward reducing crime across five Latin American countries and the United States. We compare homicide, robbery, and theft estimates and find a higher willingness to contribute to more severe crimes and for higher crime reductions. In addition, we examine the role of information on the willingness to contribute by conducting two experiments. While we document an 11 percent gap in willingness to pay for crime reduction between people who under and over-estimate the murder rate, we find that this gap can be wholly eliminated by informing respondents about the actual level of crime. We also show that exposing respondents to crime-related news increases their willingness to pay by 5 percent. On average, our estimates suggest that households are willing to contribute around $152 per year for a 20 percent reduction in homicide, representing an increase in security spending between 15 and 65 percent in Latin American countries (up to 0.5 percent of GDP).

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.