Showing papers in "Journal of Public Economics in 2010"

TL;DR: Estimated annual social rates of return generally fall between 7-10 percent, with most estimates substantially lower than those previously reported in the literature, but returns are generally statistically significantly different from zero for both males and females and are above the historical return on equity.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles, and find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment, reduced household size, and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group.

TL;DR: The authors conducted a bribery experiment and found that, among undergraduates, they could predict who would act corruptly with reference to the level of corruption in their home country, but among graduate students they could not.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used panel data for 117 countries over 32 years, cleaned for a variety of problems in standard data sources, to address a central question of fact: have countries recovered from domestic taxes the revenues they have lost from past episodes of trade liberalization?

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects on non-cognitive child outcomes of participating in large scale publicly provided universal pre-school programs and family day care vis-a-vis home care are investigated.

TL;DR: This article examined motivations for prosocial behavior using new data on volunteer firefighters that contain a dictator game based measure of altruism, surveyed measures of other behavioral factors, and call records that provide an objective measure of time spent volunteering.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors exploit the discrete jump in the probability of EU transfer receipt at the 75% threshold for identification of causal effects of Objective 1 treatment on outcome such as economic growth of EU regions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns was investigated. But the results showed that an increase in the measure of beauty was associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate.

TL;DR: This paper showed that there are potentially important racial differences in the relationship between social status and academic achievement and that the effect is concentrated among students with a grade point average (GPA) of 3.5 or higher and more pronounced in schools with more interracial contact.

TL;DR: This article found that the average U.S. unemployed worker devotes about 41 min to job search on weekdays, which is substantially more than their European counterparts, and workers who expect to be recalled by their previous employer search substantially less than the average unemployed worker.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present both laboratory experiments and field data that suggest larger choice sets induce a stronger preference for simple, easy-to-understand options, rather than less risky, options.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance under piece-rate incentives was studied in a real-effort setting, where students received information that allowed them to know whether they were above (below) the class average as well as the distance from this average.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the potential for soft drink taxes to combat rising levels of child and adolescent obesity through a reduction in consumption and showed that this reduction in soda consumption is completely offset by increases in consumption of other high-calorie drinks.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a rich panel data set and a sequence of tax reforms that took place in Sweden during the 1980's to estimate the elasticity of the hourly wage rate with respect to the net-of-tax rate.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighboring public and private schools, and find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%.

TL;DR: This paper study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution and find that a significant subset of the subjects systematically deviate from monetary payoff maximization towards the tax rate that benefits their group when the monetary cost of doing so is not too high.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare the performance of two contest designs: a standard winner-take-all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement.

TL;DR: This paper examined possible motives and institutional factors that impact giving and found that very generous donations to charities that aid the needy (with modal gifts of the entire dictator's stakes) cannot be attributed to familiarity with the charities.

TL;DR: In this article, the effect of gender quotas on women's involvement in political activity was analyzed by using a rich data set providing information on all Italian local administrators who were elected from 1985 to 2007.

TL;DR: The authors examined an affirmative action program for "lower-caste" groups in engineering colleges in India and found that despite poor entrance exam scores, lowercaste entrants obtained a positive return to admission.

TL;DR: In this article, the effects of stochastic oil demand on optimal oil extraction paths and tax, spending and government debt policies are analyzed when the oil demand schedule is linear and preferences quadratic.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers' pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: warm glow altruism and pure altruism.

TL;DR: In this article, home equity may substitute for long-term care insurance (LTCI) for the elderly, since the elderly commonly hold substantial wealth in the form of home equity that is rarely spent before death, except for after moves to longterm care facilities.

TL;DR: This paper found that the average transfers were about 20% lower in the sessions in which winning was determined by performance in a task rather than by sheer luck, which corroborates the conjecture that perceived determinants of success affect the support for redistribution.

TL;DR: The authors analyzed the impact of LIHTC construction at three different levels of geography, MSA, county, and 10-mile radius circles, and found that nearly 100% of the development is offset by a reduction in the number of newly built unsubsidized rental units.

TL;DR: Li et al. as mentioned in this paper conducted the first systematic evaluation of the world's largest community-based development program, which finances public investments in designated poor villages based on participatory village planning and found that the program significantly increased both government and village-financed investments.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider rent seeking contests between at least two agents who might value the prize differently and show the existence of a mixed-strategy equilibrium and establish equilibrium payoffs.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes changes the optimal nonlinear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy and derived a simple formula that complements Saez's formula obtained in closed economy.

TL;DR: This article studied the impact of tax incentives for investment on firms that lose money and found that tax incentives have the smallest impact on investment exactly when they are most likely to be put in place.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on sickness absence behavior and labor costs and show that the direct labor cost savings effect stemming from the cut in replacement levels clearly exceeds the indirect effect due to the decrease in absenteeism.