Showing papers in "Journal of Public Economics in 2014"

TL;DR: In this paper, a non-survey based proxy for an area's racial animus was proposed: the percent of Google search queries that include racially charged language, and the proxy was compared to Barack Obama's vote shares, controlling for the vote share of John Kerry.

TL;DR: This article measured the extent of lying costs among a representative sample of the German population by calling them at home and found that participants have a clear monetary incentive to misreport, misreporting cannot be detected, reputational concerns are negligible and altruism, efficiency concerns or conditional cooperation cannot play a role.

TL;DR: This paper conducted a field experiment to evaluate the effect of extrinsic rewards, both financial and non-financial, on the performance of agents recruited by a public health organization to promote HIV prevention and sell condoms.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider how influential corporate income taxes are in determining where firms choose to legally own intellectual property and find that recent reforms that give preferential tax treatment to income arising from patents are likely to have significant effects on the location of ownership of new intellectual property.

TL;DR: This article presented a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time, and found that media bias is greater and state ownership of media more likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens' individual best interest.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians, as measured by the average number of years of education, were analyzed.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed an optimal policy when consumers of energy-using durables undervalue energy costs relative to their private optima, based on the assumption that consumers are mechanically less responsive to energy taxes.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the impact of a carbon tax on manufacturing plants using panel data from the UK production census and find that the carbon tax had a strong negative impact on energy intensity and electricity use.

TL;DR: This article found no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates, and no evidence of political spillovers: exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine whether exposure to persistent resource scarcity on the commons affects pastoralists' readiness to engage in antisocial behavior towards their fellow commons users and find that conflict behavior occurs twice as often in an area where resources are scarcer and competitive pressure is higher.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the taxable income elasticity at a very large kink point of the Swedish tax schedule using the bunching method and derive tighter bounds on the long-run elasticity than previous studies.

TL;DR: In this paper, a new method is proposed that will resolve inconsistency due to mean reversion under testable assumptions regarding the degree of serial correlation in the error term, using this procedure, I estimate an ETI of 0.858, which is about twice as large as the estimates found in the most frequently cited paper on this subject.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated how changes in Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)-level house prices affect household fertility decisions and found that short-term increases in house prices lead to a decline in births among non-owners and a net increase among owners.

TL;DR: In this article, a nonparametric multiple rankings regression discontinuity design (RDD) was proposed to evaluate the impact of the subsidies on employment, investment, and turnover of private firms.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study whether using prosocial incentives, where effort is tied directly to charitable contributions, may lead to better performance than standard incentive schemes and find that individuals indeed work harder for charity than for themselves, but only when incentive stakes are low.

TL;DR: It is found that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increasesannuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an "all or nothing" decision.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess whether politicians manipulate the timing of tax rate changes in a strategic way to maximize reelection prospects in German local business tax and find that the growth rate of business tax is significantly reduced in the election year and the year prior to the election while it jumps up in the year after the election.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors measure how provision of retirement income projections along with enrollment information affects individuals' contributions to employer-sponsored retirement accounts and find that the intervention boosted annual contributions to the employer retirement accounts by $85, equivalent to 3.6% or 0.15% of average salary.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the impact of incentives on the willingness to donate to online giving organizations by embedding a field experiment embedded in an online giving organization's web page, where donors who have completed an online transaction were randomly asked to share having donated by posting on their Facebook wall or by sending a private message to a friend on FB.

TL;DR: This article investigated the effects of school closing policies on student achievement by examining over 200 school closings in Michigan and found that students displaced from relatively low-performing schools experience achievement gains, while the displacement of students and teachers creates modest negative spillover effects on the receiving schools.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the impact of the source tax on Swiss bank deposits held by EU residents while using that non-EU residents were not subject to the tax to apply a natural experiment methodology.

TL;DR: In this article, a proxy for corruption among Liberian community leaders by keeping track of a flow of inputs associated with a development intervention, measuring these inputs before and after giving them in custody to the chief.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors combine models of collective wage bargaining, creative job destruction, and welfare spending to understand how this might be an economic and political equilibrium, and show how the political support of welfare spending is fueled by both a higher mean wage and a lower wage dispersion.

TL;DR: In this article, a regression discontinuity analysis was used to examine participation in a large-scale residential energy-efficiency program, and the authors found that program participation increases with larger subsidy amounts, but that most households would have participated even with much lower subsidy amounts.

TL;DR: The authors measured people's pro-social behavior, in terms of voluntary money and labor contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge, and voluntary money contributions in a public good game, using the same non-student sample in rural Vietnam at four different points in time from 2005 to 2011.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital, including interpersonal and civic engagement in the real world, and find no evidence that the Internet reduces social capital.

TL;DR: In this paper, a regression discontinuity design analysis on a large database of Italian procurement auctions is presented, showing that the increased publicity requirement induces more entry and higher winning rebates, which reduces the costs of procurement and rationalizes public spending.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the impact of smoking restrictions on birth outcomes of children of female workers who are aected by smoking bans in the workplace and found that most of the benefits arise from changes in smoking behavior of the mother; the effect of second hand smoke exposure on birth outcome appears to be quite small.

TL;DR: The authors used a regression discontinuity design on a newly collected dataset of local referenda in Ohio to isolate the effect of exogenous increases in taxation and spending of one jurisdiction on neighbors' fiscal decisions.

TL;DR: The authors examined the effectiveness of using asymmetric liability to combat harassment bribes and found that weak economic incentives for the bribe-giver, or retaliation by bribe-takers can mitigate the positive disciplining effect of such an implementation.