scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question

Showing papers in "Journal of Public Economics in 2006"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the relation between elections and fiscal policy and found evidence of political budget cycles: on average, government fiscal deficit increases by almost 1% of GDP in election years.

801 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article found no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling, and found evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting, as the bbestQ public school students left for the private sector.

655 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article used a data set of federal corruption convictions in the U.S. to investigate the causes and consequences of corruption and found that more educated states, and to a smaller degree richer states, have less corruption.

562 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in Argentina and find that one year of preprimary schooling increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores.

496 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the extent to which the corruption in developing countries may impair the ability of governments to redistribute wealth among their citizens and found that the welfare losses from this corruption may have been large enough to offset the potential welfare gains from the redistributive intent of the program.

426 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the empirical relation between CO2 emissions per capita and GDP per capita during the period 1960-1996, using a panel of 100 countries and found evidence of structural stability of the relationship.

397 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of affiliate-level data for American firms indicates that larger, more international firms, and those with extensive intra-firm trade and high R and D intensities, are the most likely to use tax havens.

383 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article presented a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their investigations and persists despite profit-maximizing news organizations and rivalry from other news organizations.

372 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate "sin taxes" on unhealthy items, such as fatty foods, that people may (by their own reckoning) consume too much of, and show that imposing taxes on these unhealthy items and returning the proceeds to consumers can generally improve total social surplus.

358 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes was studied by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of preprimary places.

326 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the importance of peer effects using exogenous variation in college roommates and found only very limited evidence that a student's first year grade performance is influenced by the observable academic characteristics of his/her roommate.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors characterize the Nash equilibria of the induced preference revelation game and show that a transition from the Boston mechanism to the student-optimal stable mechanism would lead to unambiguous efficiency gains.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examined the effect of income and wealth heterogeneity in the voluntary provision of a linear public good and found that less wealthy subjects gave the same absolute amount (and more as a percentage of their income) as the more wealthy subjects.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess the effectiveness of different public policy instruments for the creation of active venture capital markets and find no evidence of a shortage of supply of venture capital funds in Europe.

Journal ArticleDOI
Antonio Fatás1, Ilian Mihov1
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use data from 48 US states to investigate how budget rules affect fiscal policy outcomes and find that strict budgetary restrictions lead to lower policy volatility (i.e. less aggressive use of discretion in conducting fiscal policy) and reduce the responsiveness of fiscal policy to output shocks.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article study the effects of the threat of vouchers and stigma in Florida on the performance of low-performing schools and find that the relative gains in reading are largely explained by changing student characteristics and the gains in math are limited to the high-stakes grade.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated whether schools may employ discipline for misbehavior as a tool to bolster aggregate test performance and found that schools always tend to assign harsher punishments to low performing students than to high performing students throughout the year, this gap grows substantially during the testing window.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the desirability of bundling the building and management operations is analyzed, and it is considered whether it is optimal to allocate ownership to the public or the private sector.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth is proposed, and empirical findings on a panel of France's regions over 1985-92 suggest that electoral concerns and influence activities were significant determinants of the cross-regional allocation of transportation infrastructure investments.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore conventional peer effects and the effects of socially proximate peers at a large public university where some students are randomly assigned to housing, and conclude that there is little evidence of robust residential peer effects on undergraduate performance.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the key economic assumptions under which these parameters determine the optimal level of social insurance and showed that a Baily-type expression, with an adjustment for precautionary saving motives, holds in a general class of dynamic models subject to weak regularity conditions.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated how income tax differentials across municipalities affect the households' location decisions and found that rich households are significantly and substantially more likely to move to low-tax municipalities than poor households.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper extended the theory and measurement of the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) to account for labor force participation responses and showed numerically that the implications for MCF tend to be substantial.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors developed a model in which candidates can influence their winning probability in electoral districts by spending money on campaigning, which endogenously increases the equilibrium probability that the first winner wins in further districts.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a neoclassical theory with an endogenous nonprofit sector was proposed, which implies that nonprofit firms have a competitive advantage over for-profit firms, so that marginal changes in the industry operate through the forprofit sector.

Journal ArticleDOI
Brian Knight1
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors test for the capitalization of policy platforms into equity prices using a sample of 70 firms favored under Bush or Gore platforms during the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the influence of political parties on state Tax Burdens over a forty-year period (1960-2000) was estimated by holding constant a large number of state and voter characteristic variables, and they found that tax burdens are higher when Democrats control the state legislature compared to when Republicans are in control.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper provided new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership, using a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which they validate.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify two mechanisms through which racism among American voters decreases the degree of redistribution that would otherwise obtain, and propose a formal model of multi-dimensional political competition that enables them to estimate the magnitude of these two effects, and estimate the model for the period in question.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify an information externality that raises the cost of offering contributions and show that this indirect search cost reduces the group's incentive to gather information when contributions are allowed.