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Heterogeneity in the pass-through from oil to gasoline prices: A new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Lutz Kilian, Xiaoqing Zhou
We propose a new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand that exploits systematic differences across U.S. states in the pass-through of oil price shocks to retail gasoline prices. We show that these differences are primarily driven by the cost of producing and distributing gasoline, which varies with states’ access to oil and gasoline transportation infrastructure, refinery
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The effect of required minimum distributions on intergenerational transfers J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Jonathan M. Leganza
Tax policy may influence intergenerational transfers, especially the method and timing of gifts. In this paper, I study how tax rules that mandate the decumulation of retirement savings accounts impact transfers from parents to children. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and a regression discontinuity design, I estimate the causal effects of aging into Required Minimum Distribution (RMD)
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Online tutoring works: Experimental evidence from a program with vulnerable children J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Lucas Gortazar, Claudia Hupkau, Antonio Roldán-Monés
We provide evidence from a randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of a novel, 100-percent online math tutoring program, targeted at secondary school students from highly disadvantaged neighborhoods. The intensive, eight-week-long program was delivered in groups of two students during after-school hours, mostly by qualified math teachers. The intervention significantly increased standardized
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Dynamic electoral competition with voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Ben Lockwood, Minh Le, James Rockey
This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamics of electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. The interplay between the median voter’s reference point and political parties’ choice of platforms generates a dynamic process of (de)polarization, following an initial shift in party ideology. This is consistent with the gradual
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Social mobility in Germany J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-24 Majed Dodin, Sebastian Findeisen, Lukas Henkel, Dominik Sachs, Paul Schüle
We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Motivated by Germany’s tracking system in secondary education, our measure of opportunity is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated with a 5.2 percentage point increase in the A-Level
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The impact of withdrawal penalties on retirement savings J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Ellen Stuart, Victoria L. Bryant
Tax-benefited retirement accounts have features designed to encourage saving, including a penalty for withdrawing before age . Account holders also face a penalty for failing to take required minimum withdrawals after age 72. Using a bunching analysis, we estimate that these penalties cause over 17% of traditional IRA holders to change their withdrawal timing each year, shifting almost $60 billion
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National parks and economic development J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Andrea Szabó, Gergely Ujhelyi
This paper studies the economic effects of the US National Park System, the largest national conservation entity in the world. We assemble a new dataset on the history of the system, and show that parks increase overall employment and income in the local economy. The data allows us to study several specific mechanisms. Economic effects appear to be driven by visitors, and they cannot be explained by
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A toolkit for setting and evaluating price floors J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Carlos Eduardo Hernández, Santiago Cantillo-Cleves
Regulators often impose price floors to protect producers from suspected market power by intermediaries. We present a toolkit for predicting, estimating, and explaining the effect of price floors on output and the distribution of welfare. We apply this toolkit to the Colombian road freight sector, taking advantage of rate floors that intended to protect carriers from low freight rates paid by intermediaries
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The long-run impacts of adolescent drinking: Evidence from Zero Tolerance Laws J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Tatiana Abboud, Andriana Bellou, Joshua Lewis
This paper provides the first long-run assessment of adolescent alcohol control policies on later-life health and labor market outcomes. Our analysis exploits cross-state variation in the rollout of “Zero Tolerance” (ZT) Laws, which set strict alcohol limits for drivers under age 21 and led to sharp reductions in youth binge drinking. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach that combines information
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Why are older men working more? The role of social security J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Zhixiu Yu
This paper investigates the role of Social Security reforms in explaining the increase in labor supply of older men across cohorts and evaluates the labor response by health status. I develop and estimate a rich dynamic life-cycle model of labor supply, savings, and Social Security application that captures the key structure of Social Security retirement benefits, disability insurance, and pension
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Early childhood human capital formation at scale J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Johannes M. Bos, Abu S. Shonchoy, Saravana Ravindran, Akib Khan
Can governments leverage existing service-delivery platforms to scale early childhood development (ECD) interventions? We experimentally study a large-scale, low-cost home-visiting intervention – providing materials and counseling – integrated into Bangladesh’s national nutrition program without extra financial incentives for service providers (SPs). We find SPs partially substitute away from nutritional
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The limits of social recognition: Experimental evidence from blood donors J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Lorenz Goette, Egon Tripodi
Does social recognition motivate prosocial individuals? We run large-scale experiments at Italy’s main blood donors association, evaluating social recognition through social media and peer groups against a simple ask to donate. Across several studies, we find that the simple ask is at least as effective as offering social recognition. In a survey experiment with blood donors we show that socially recognized
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Self-signaling in voting J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Lydia Mechtenberg, Grischa Perino, Nicolas Treich, Jean-Robert Tyran, Stephanie W. Wang
This paper presents a two-wave survey experiment to examine the impact of self-image concerns on voting behavior. We elicit votes on a ballot initiative on animal welfare in Switzerland that spurred campaigns involving widely shared normative values. We send a message to voters about scientific evidence supporting the claim that “good-hearted people tend to be good to animals.” We interpret this message
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The (in)visible hand: Do workers discriminate against employers? J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Philipp Doerrenberg, Denvil Duncan, Danyang Li
Although a large literature has studied discrimination in the labor market, there is little evidence on sex- and race-based discrimination of workers against (potential) employers. We implement a randomized experiment in an online labor market to contribute to this gap in the literature. In our experiment, workers make labor-supply decisions after we randomly expose them to signals about the race and
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The labor market impacts of America’s first paid maternity leave policy J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Brenden Timpe
This paper provides new evidence on the effect of a national expansion of paid maternity leave on the labor-market outcomes of women in the United States. I develop an identification strategy that exploits the staggered expansion of paid leave through short-term disability insurance in the 1960s and 1970s. The policy expanded leave-taking among new mothers but also precipitated a decrease in hourly
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Inside the West Wing: Lobbying as a contest J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Alastair Langtry
When a government makes many different policy decisions, lobbying can be viewed as a contest between the government and many different special interest groups. The government fights lobbying by interest groups with its own political capital. In this world, we find that a government wants to ‘sell protection’ – give favourable treatment in exchange for contributions – to certain interest groups. It
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The econometrics of happiness: Are we underestimating the returns to education and income? J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 C.P. Barrington-Leigh
This paper describes a fundamental and empirically conspicuous problem inherent to surveys of human feelings and opinions in which subjective responses are elicited on numerical scales. The paper also proposes a solution. The problem is a tendency by some individuals — particularly those with low levels of education — to simplify the response scale by considering only a subset of possible responses
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No-claim refunds and healthcare use J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Daniel Avdic, Simon Decker, Martin Karlsson, Martin Salm
No-claim refunds are cost-control instruments which stipulate a payback agreement contingent on one or more claim-free years. We study how such no-claim refunds affect claiming behavior using claims data from a large German health insurer and a policy that increased the refund size for certain plans. We propose a method to decompose the effect on claims into behavioral and non-behavioral components
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Credit access and housing insecurity: Evidence from winter utility shutoff protections J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Alison Lodermeier
Fifty-six percent of urban renters face some level of housing insecurity. I explore the role of credit access, or lack thereof, as a contributing factor. To do so, I study a temporary line of credit extended to households in the form of protection from heat shutoffs during the winter. These protections allow households to delay winter energy payments without risk of losing their heat. I adopt a triple
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Improving preschool provision and encouraging-demand: Evidence from a large-scale construction program J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Jan Berkes, Adrien Bouguen, Deon Filmer, Tsuyoshi Fukao
We study the impact of a preschool construction program and of two demand-side interventions in Cambodia. Within this context where other preschools are available, impacts are likely to differ between children who would have been enrolled in a preexisting preschool and those who would have stayed at home, with larger expected gains for the latter. After one year, we measure positive intent-to-treat
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Disparate racial impacts of Shelby County v. Holder on voter turnout J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Stephen B. Billings, Noah Braun, Daniel B. Jones, Ying Shi
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that enabled federal electoral oversight in select jurisdictions. We study whether this decision disproportionately impacted ballot access for Black and Hispanic registered voters. We use a rich dataset on voter behavior for the universe of registered voters combined with Census block-level
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The effects of electronic monitoring on offenders and their families J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Julien Grenet, Hans Grönqvist, Susan Niknami
Electronic monitoring (EM) has emerged as a popular tool for curbing the growth of large prison populations. Evidence on the causal effects of EM on criminal recidivism is, however, limited and it is unclear how this alternative to incarceration affects the labor supply of offenders and the outcomes of their family members. We study the countrywide expansion of EM in Sweden in 1997 wherein offenders
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Moving opportunities: The impact of mixed-income public housing regenerations on student achievement J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Lorenzo Neri
I use mixed-income public housing regenerations in London as a natural experiment to identify how schools affect low-income students’ educational achievement when affluent households flow into their neighborhood. I compare student achievement in schools in the same neighborhood located at different distances from a regeneration before and after its completion. I employ a grandfathering instrument for
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Transitory income changes and consumption smoothing: Evidence from Mexico J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-26 Manuela Angelucci, Carlos Chiapa, Silvia Prina, Irvin Rojas
We test if 3534 beneficiaries of PROSPERA, Mexico’s cash transfer program, smooth food consumption before and after the date of the transfer receipt, and if consumption smoothing is costly. The transfer is an anticipated and transitory income shock and, thus, the PIH predicts that consumption should be smooth before and after its receipt. We find that food consumption does not change the days before
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Risky moms, risky kids? fertility and crime after the fall of the wall J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Arnaud Chevalier, Olivier Marie
Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the birth rate halved in East Germany. Using detailed state-cohort-level arrest-data, and a difference in differences strategy, we show that individuals born during this period of socio-economic turmoil were markedly more likely to be arrested than those conceived a few years earlier. This is the case for most crime types and both for boys and girls. Since
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Powers that be? Political alignment, government formation, and government stability J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Felipe Carozzi, Davide Cipullo, Luca Repetto
We study how partisan alignment across levels of government affects coalition formation and government stability using a regression discontinuity design and a large dataset of Spanish municipal elections. We document a positive effect of alignment on both government formation and stability. Alignment increases the probability that the most-voted party appoints the mayor and decreases the probability
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Football, alcohol, and domestic abuse J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Ria Ivandić, Tom Kirchmaier, Yasaman Saeidi, Neus Torres Blas
We study the role of alcohol and emotions in explaining the dynamics in domestic abuse following major football games. We match confidential and uniquely detailed individual call data from Greater Manchester with the timing of football matches over a period of eight years to estimate the effect on domestic abuse. We find that a football game changes the dynamics of abuse throughout the day. We first
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Income effects and labour supply: Evidence from a child benefits reform J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen, Jack Blundell
In this paper, we exploit a unique and unexpected reform to the child benefit system in Denmark to assess the effects of child benefits on parental labour supply. A cap on child benefit payments in 2011 led to a non-negligible reduction in child benefits for larger families with young children while leaving child benefits for smaller families unchanged. The differential impact of this policy represents
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Joint retirement of couples: Evidence from discontinuities in Denmark J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Esteban García-Miralles, Jonathan M. Leganza
We study joint retirement and its underlying determinants. First, we use full-population data from Denmark and a discontinuity design to document joint retirement at the early pension eligibility age. For every 100 individuals who retire when they reach pension eligibility, around 8 of their spouses adjust their behavior to retire at the same time. Next, we investigate mechanisms. We begin by arguing
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Welfare effects of unemployment benefits when informality is high J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Hannah Liepmann, Clemente Pignatti
We investigate the welfare effects of unemployment benefits (UBs) in the context of high informality, analyzing matched administrative and survey data with detailed information on consumption, transfers and informal and formal employment of UB recipients. Difference-in-differences analysis reveals a comparatively large consumption drop after the loss of a formal job, resulting from shifts towards lower-quality
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Financial repercussions of SNAP work requirements J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Samuel Dodini, Jeff Larrimore, Anna Tranfaglia
This paper considers individual-level credit responses after the implementation of work requirements for SNAP benefits. It does so by exploiting county-level variation in the reintroduction of work requirements after the Great Recession. We find that new SNAP work requirements lead more people to seek out new credit and lead to an increase in credit account openings. New work requirements also result
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The effect of disability insurance receipt on mortality J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Bernard Black, Eric French, Jeremy McCauley, Jae Song
This paper estimates the effect of Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income receipt on mortality for individuals on the margin of being allowed versus denied benefits. Exploiting the random assignment of administrative law judges to disability insurance cases, we find that benefit allowance increases 10-year mortality rates by 2.8 percentage points for marginal beneficiaries. However,
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Organized crime, violence and support for the state J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-11-25 Gian Maria Campedelli, Gianmarco Daniele, Andrea F.M. Martinangeli, Paolo Pinotti
Citizens’ support is crucial to effectively combat organized crime, a substantial threat to many countries. Contrary to prior studies identifying a negative correlation between crime and trust in the state, studying a representative sample of 5374 individuals in Italy we find that exposing the participants to journalistic images of organized crime-related violence increases trust towards institutions
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Complementarities in behavioral interventions: Evidence from a field experiment on resource conservation J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-11-23 Ximeng Fang, Lorenz Goette, Bettina Rockenbach, Matthias Sutter, Verena Tiefenbeck, Samuel Schoeb, Thorsten Staake
Behavioral policy often aims at influencing behavior by mitigating biases due to, e.g., imperfect information or inattention. We study how this is affected by the simultaneous presence of multiple biases arising from different sources, through a field experiment on resource conservation in an energy- and water-intensive everyday activity (showering). One intervention, shower energy reports, primarily
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Encouragement and distortionary effects of conditional cash transfers J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Gharad Bryan, Shyamal Chowdhury, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, Melanie Morten, Joeri Smits
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty or advance social goals by encouraging desirable behavior that recipients under-invest in. An unintended consequence of conditionality may be the distortion of recipients’ behavior in ways that lower welfare. We first illustrate a range of potential distortions arising from CCT programs around the world. We then show that in the simple
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Academic mobility in U.S. public schools: Evidence from nearly 3 million students J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Wes Austin, David Figlio, Dan Goldhaber, Eric A. Hanushek, Tara Kilbride, Cory Koedel, Jaeseok Sean Lee, Jin Lou, Umut Özek, Eric Parsons, Steven G. Rivkin, Tim R. Sass, Katharine O. Strunk
We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in “academic mobility,” a term we use to describe the extent to which students’ ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. We find that student ranks are highly persistent during elementary and secondary education—that is, academic
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The market-level effects of charter schools on student outcomes: A national analysis of school districts J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Feng Chen, Douglas N. Harris
We study the total, market-level effects of charter schools, and their mechanisms, on a national level and across multiple outcomes. Using a generalized difference-in-differences method, we find that increasing the charter market share by 10 percentage points increases math and ELA elementary/middle test scores of the entire geographic district in which they locate by 0.01 standard deviations and increases
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Increasing the take-up of public health services: An at-scale experiment on digital government J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Sebastian Gallegos, Benjamin Roseth, Ana Cuesta, Mario Sánchez
Increasing public service take-up is a critical challenge. We invested in a government-run digital appointment system for an important health screening service and conducted a large-scale experiment encouraging its use, specifically assessing the influence of transactions costs and information. Using administrative records on the near-universe of eligible women (47,600) in Uruguay’s capital city, we
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Measuring take-up of the California EITC with state administrative data J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 John Iselin, Taylor Mackay, Matthew Unrath
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest cash-based means-tested transfer program in the United States. In 2021, 31 million households received $64 billion from the federal EITC. Twenty-eight states also offer eligible taxpayers a supplement to the federal program. An estimated one-fifth of eligible households fail to claim the federal credit, but little is known about take-up of these state
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Bitcoin and carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence from daily production decisions J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Anna Papp, Douglas Almond, Shuang Zhang
Environmental externalities from cryptomining may be large, but have not been linked causally to mining incentives. We exploit daily variation in Bitcoin price as a natural experiment for an 86 megawatt waste coal-fired power plant with on-site cryptomining. We find that carbon emissions respond swiftly to mining incentives, with price elasticities of 0.69–0.71 in the short-run and 0.33–0.40 in the
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The air quality and well-being effects of low emission zones J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Luis Sarmiento, Nicole Wägner, Aleksandar Zaklan
This study provides the first evidence of the subjective well-being impacts of low emission zones (LEZs) while also undertaking a comprehensive analysis of their air quality effects. We identify causal impacts by exploiting the zones’ introduction date with difference-in-differences designs robust to staggered implementations and time-varying treatment effects. Results show air quality improvements
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Uncovering illegal and underground economies: The case of mafia extortion racketeering J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Lavinia Piemontese
I propose a new approach to quantify the economic cost of hidden economies and apply it to the case of mafia extortion in Northern Italy. To quantify the extortion rate, unobserved in the data, I first show that extortion racketeering is linked to resource misallocation. Then, I implement a structural estimation based on matching the observed misallocation in markets defined as mafia-infiltrated, with
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News credibility and the quest for clicks J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-21 Kohei Kawamura, Mark T. Le Quement
We examine a model of dynamic communication by a media outlet. In each period, the uninformed public can consult the outlet’s report at a cost. The outlet, which is primarily driven by profit maximization, has an incentive to induce uncertainty in order to encourage future consultation and thereby generate revenue. In an intermediate cost range, the public and the outlet may be worse off with a cheaper
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The employment effects of collective wage bargaining J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Bernardo Fanfani
This study examines the wage and employment effects of Italian collective wage bargaining. It analyzes monthly data on the population of private-sector employees, matched with the information on contractual pay levels set by industry-wide agreements, which were bargained by the representatives of trade unions and employers at the national level. The research design exploited the generalized wage growth
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Kosher Pork J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Allan Drazen, Ethan Ilzetzki
There are two common views of pork barrel spending. One is that pork barrel spending benefits special interests at the expense of social welfare, hence antithetical to responsible policy making, especially in times of crisis. An alternative is that pork “greases the legislative wheels” making possible the enactment of socially beneficial legislation that would otherwise not pass. In this paper we reexamine
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With a little help from my friends. Political competition in the shadow of organized crime J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Pasquale Accardo, Giuseppe De Feo, Giacomo De Luca
Higher electoral competition may reinforce the position of politically active criminal organizations, which can endorse politicians in exchange for favors. This paper formalizes this intuition and test it on Italian electoral data, using the 1991 electoral reform as an exogenous source of variation in electoral competition in one of the two branches of the Parliament. Our triple-difference estimates
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Tax wedges, financial frictions and misallocation J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Árpád Ábrahám, Piero Gottardi, Joachim Hubmer, Lukas Mayr
We revisit the classical result that in a closed economy the incidence of corporate taxes on labor is approximately zero. We consider a rich general equilibrium framework, where agents differ in the level of their wealth as well as in their managerial and working ability. Potential entrepreneurs go through all the key decisions affected by corporate tax changes: the choice of (i) occupation, (ii) organizational
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The disparate effects of information provision: A field experiment on the work incentives of social welfare J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Sofie Cairo, Robert Mahlstedt
Recipients of transfer payments must navigate intricate rules and regulations governing their incentives. This complexity carries the risk of prompting them to make privately suboptimal decisions and may, in turn, reduce overall welfare. Combining data from a large-scale scale field experiment and detailed administrative records, we investigate the labor market effects of informing social welfare recipients
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Using payroll taxes as a redistribution tool J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-23 Antoine Bozio, Thomas Breda, Malka Guillot
Payroll taxes are usually designed to fund social insurance and not to contribute directly to redistribution. Over the last fifty years, France has modified dramatically the schedule of payroll taxation, turning it into the most progressive part of its tax system. Using administrative data and detailed microsimulation model of labor income taxation, we show that pretax wage (or labor cost) inequality
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Effects of unemployment insurance duration on mental and physical health J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Alexander Ahammer, Analisa Packham
Using administrative data for Upper Austrian workers from 2003–2013, we show that a 9-week extension in unemployment insurance (UI) duration increases nonemployment length by 4 days, on average, and impacts worker physical and mental health. These effects vary by gender. Specifically, we find that female workers eligible for an additional 9 weeks of UI benefits reduce opioid and antidepressant prescriptions
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Behavioral cross-influence of a shadow tax bracket: Evidence from bunching where income tax liabilities start J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Raphaël Lardeux
Prediction of tax revenue must account for earnings responses with respect to all perceived incentives, whether they are effective or not. This paper explores the extent to which tax filers respond to irrelevant incentives and develops an identification procedure for the behavioral cross-influence (BCI), a behavioral elasticity created by Farhi and Gabaix (2020) to capture such responses. Relying on
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Hostel takeover: Living conditions, reference dependence, and the well-being of migrant workers J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-16 Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, Huayu Xu
We report impacts of a randomized housing quality improvement intervention among Indian migrant workers. Despite modest improvements in conditions, respondents experienced a decline in satisfaction and a large increase in psychological distress as a result of treatment. In contrast, residents who faced the same treatment-induced variation in living conditions as the original sample, but who arrived
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Fertility and parental retirement J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Julius Ilciukas
I study how reduced retirement opportunities in one generation affect fertility in the subsequent generation. I use administrative Dutch data and exploit the 2006 Dutch pension reform, which induced individuals born from January 1, 1950 onward to delay retirement while exempting those born earlier. I find that this reform reduced fertility among women with affected mothers. The reduction is economically
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Sequential agenda setting with strategic and informative voting J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Jidong Chen
We present a two-period collective bargaining model with asymmetric information and a persistent agenda setter. Voters have private information about their policy preferences. Only upon the failure of the initial proposal does the setter have a chance to revise it and call for a re-vote. The status quo gets implemented if the revised proposal fails. We establish the existence of an informative equilibrium
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Unemployment benefits and redundancies: Incidence and timing effects J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-09 Laura Khoury
The literature on unemployment insurance (UI) has primarily focused on its impact on unemployment outflows. Using administrative data and a discontinuity in UI benefits at a job tenure threshold, I show that inflows also respond to the generosity of UI. Based on bunching estimates, I measure that 10% of layoffs in an 4-week window before the threshold are delayed, creating a bunching mass on the high-benefit
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Intergenerational income mobility in France: A comparative and geographic analysis J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Gustave Kenedi, Louis Sirugue
We provide new estimates of intergenerational income mobility in France for children born in the 1970s using rich administrative data. Since parents’ incomes are not observed, we employ a two-sample two-stage least squares estimation. We show, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, that this method slightly underestimates rank-based measures of intergenerational persistence. Our results suggest
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The impact of policy awareness: Evidence from vehicle choices response to fiscal incentives J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-09-02 Davide Cerruti, Claudio Daminato, Massimo Filippini
Isolating the role of limited knowledge, psychological frictions and policy characteristics is key when evaluating a public program and designing future policies. We document limited awareness about the presence of fiscal incentives towards fuel efficient vehicles. Exploiting a direct measure of awareness at the individual level, we find vehicle choices response heterogeneity to these fiscal incentives
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Cleaning up the Great Lakes: Housing market impacts of removing legacy pollutants J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Alecia Cassidy, Robyn C. Meeks, Michael R. Moore
The Great Lakes and their tributaries make up the largest freshwater system on the planet, providing drinking water and recreational value to millions of people. Yet manufacturing plants left a legacy of toxic pollutants in the region, tarnishing it as part of the “Rust Belt.” In 1987, the Area of Concern (AOC) Program designated 30 areas in the region as having hazardous water quality. Almost 1.23
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Tax losses and ex-ante offshore transfer of intellectual property J. Public Econ. (IF 8.262) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Rishi R. Sharma, Joel Slemrod, Michael Stimmelmayr
We develop a positive model of multinational firm behavior and analyze a firm’s incentive to transfer an intellectual property (IP) right of uncertain value offshore ex ante, i.e. before its success or failure is realized. Our analysis highlights two major aspects of this decision. First, an asymmetric treatment of project gains and losses in the home country creates an incentive to transfer IP to