Showing papers in "Journal of Public Economics in 2007"

TL;DR: The authors used compulsory schooling laws to evaluate high school dropout decisions and found that lifetime wealth increases by about 15% with an extra year of compulsory schooling, and that students who are compelled to stay in school are also less likely to report being in poor health, unemployed, and unhappy.

TL;DR: In this paper, the feasibility and desirability of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are explored and compared with traditional models of private provision of public goods, showing that firms that use CSR will produce public goods at exactly the same level as predicted by the standard voluntary contribution equilibrium for public goods.

TL;DR: This article studied the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across different metropolitan areas, using large micro-data samples for the 1998-2001 test cohorts.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used the size of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants as an instrument for measuring the police force in regressions where crime is the outcome of interest and found that police added to the force by COPS generated statistically significant reductions in auto thefts, burglaries, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

TL;DR: The authors used government financial statistics from the IMF covering over 100 countries from 1970-2000 to identify persistent puzzles for the current set of theories and explore those puzzles in greater depth by looking at the composition of government expenditure and the level of government at which it takes place.

TL;DR: This article analyzed cross-section and panel data from up to 75 developing and transition countries for 25 years to test Riker's theory that the results of fiscal decentralization depend on the level of countries' political centralization.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the effects of leading by example in voluntary contribution experiments and find that only a minority of groups succeed in endogenously installing a leader, even though groups with leaders are much more efficient than groups without a leader.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption and construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away from factor coordination.

TL;DR: The authors examine whether discretionary government grants influence where domestic and multinational firms locate new plants, and how the presence of agglomeration externalities interacts with these policy instruments, and find that a region's existing industrial structure has an effect on the location of new entrants.

TL;DR: In this article, the tax law affects individual incentives to engage in entrepreneurial risk taking, including differences in tax rates on business vs. wage income, due to differences in the marginal tax rates faced on losses vs. profits through a progressive rate structure and through the option to incorporate.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the quality of the student populations in the Texas public schools in terms of mathematics and reading achievement and found that the average school quality in the charter sector is not significantly different from that in regular public schools after an initial start-up period.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors extend the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions and show that intrinsic nonlinearity between individual and group responses is sufficient to identify the model without imposing any exclusion restrictions.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present evidence of supply side market failures in the private long-term care insurance market and show that more comprehensive policies are widely available, if seldom purchased, at similar loads to purchased policies.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the logic of fiscal restraint in a political agency model with both moral hazard and adverse selection, and show that some forms of fiscal restrain can only be desirable when incumbents are sufficiently likely to be benevolent.

TL;DR: This paper examined the inter-temporal choices of 5- to 16-year-old children in an artefactual field experiment and found that children's choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting, boys are less patient than girls, older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores, private schooling and parent's patience are not correlated with children's patience.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the robustness of Schelling's model, focusing in particular on its driving force: the individual preferences, and show that even if all individual agents have a strict preference for perfect integration, best-response dynamics may lead to segregation.

TL;DR: The authors found that test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance, and that the relationship between the presence of merit pay in teacher compensation and student test scores is strongest in schools with the least parental oversight.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used micro data from Swiss employer-based pension plans to study the annuitization decision at retirement and found that low accumulation of retirement assets is strongly associated with the choice of the lump sum, presumably due to the availability of means-tested social assistance.

TL;DR: This article found that large cohorts within states have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment, reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market, indicating that resources have large effects on degree production and that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of college-educated workers entering the labor market.

TL;DR: In this paper, a simple theoretical framework for analysing simultaneous vertical and horizontal competition in excise taxes, and estimates equations informed by the theory on a panel of US state and federal excise taxes on cigarettes and gasoline was provided.

TL;DR: This paper studied the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience on the support for redistribution in a tax determination model. And they found support for the hypothesis that within race inequality increases redistribution while between race inequality decreases redistribution, even if a poor group forms a majority.

TL;DR: In this article, the association between expenditure decentralization and the productive efficiency of government using a data set of Swiss cantons was evaluated empirically by looking at the association with higher educational attainment.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors provided the first systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings, and used the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of unobserved (unofficial) compensation of public sector employees.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used data from California auctions for road construction contracts, where small businesses receive a 5 percent bid preference in auctions for projects using only state funds and no preferential treatment on projects using federal aid.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated whether the characteristics of the value function like concavity for gains, convexity for losses, and loss aversion apply to the dependence of life satisfaction on relative income.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in Texas to study the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement and find that students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school, but this is followed by recovery in subsequent years.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study the distributional effects of a pollution tax in general equilibrium, with general forms of substitution where pollution might be a relative complement or substitute for labor or for capital in production.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the cross-price elasticity between gasoline and leisure and find that gasoline is a relative complement to leisure, and thus that the optimal second-best gasoline tax is significantly higher than marginal damages.

TL;DR: This article investigated the extent to which the New Deal crowded-out church charitable spending in the 1930s using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New Deal spending.

TL;DR: This paper investigated the effect of the Social Security Amendments on SSDI enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy-induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits and found that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties.