Showing papers in "Journal of Public Economics in 2018"

TL;DR: In this paper, a natural experiment generated by the National Specially Monitored Firms (NSMF) program in China is used to evaluate the effectiveness of central supervision at improving local environmental enforcement.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated whether Chinese aid projects fuel local-level corruption in Africa by comparing the corruption experiences of individuals who live near a site where a Chinese project is being implemented at the time of the interview to those of individuals living close to a site that will be initiated but where implementation had not yet started.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens and use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries, which account for close to half of world GDP.

TL;DR: In this article, a reform that introduced early access to subsidized childcare for 2-year-old children in Italy, explored the effects on several measures of maternal labor supply and on children's cognitive outcomes.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study how early child care (ECC) affects children's development in a marginal treatment effect framework that allows for rich forms of observed and unobserved effect heterogeneity, and find strong but diverging effects on children's motor and socio-emotional skills.

TL;DR: It is found that the Medicaid expansions significantly reduced the number of unpaid bills and the amount of debt sent to third-party collection agencies among those residing in zip codes with the highest share of low-income, uninsured individuals.

TL;DR: In this article, a randomized trial embedded within a nationwide reform of teacher hiring in Kenyan government primary schools was conducted, where new teachers offered a fixed-term contract by an international NGO significantly raised student test scores, while teachers offered identical contracts by the Kenyan government produced zero impact.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of primary school teachers' gender biases on boys' and girls' academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

TL;DR: In this paper, the hidden costs of a popular nudge and how these costs distort policy making when neglected are investigated, showing that not accounting for hidden costs overstates the welfare effects for donors by factor ten and hides potential negative welfare effects of the charity.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the distributional national accounts (DINA) for France, which combines national accounts, tax and survey data in a comprehensive and consistent manner to build homogenous annual series on the distribution of national income by percentiles over the 1900 to 2014 period, with detailed breakdown by age, gender and income categories over the 1970-2014 period.

TL;DR: The authors analyzes the effects of environmental policy on employment (and unemployment) using a new general-equilibrium two-sector search model and finds that imposing a pollution tax causes substantial reductions in employment in the regulated (polluting) industry, but this is offset by increased employment in non-polluting (non-polluted) sector.

TL;DR: It is found that individuals who make (or have to make) fast decisions are insensitive to incentives, more often make mistakes, and are less likely to make equilibrium contributions, consistent with fast decisions being more prone to error.

TL;DR: This article examined the effect of labor market conditions on child maltreatment using county-level data from California and found only modest evidence of a link between overall economic conditions and child maltence.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined whether age 62 is associated with a discontinuous change in aggregate mortality, a key measure of population health, and found a robust two percent increase in male mortality immediately after age 62.

TL;DR: This paper investigated the relationship between discriminatory behaviour and the perceived social inappropriateness of discrimination and found that discrimination will be weaker when social norms oppose it, and the results support this prediction.

TL;DR: In this paper, a randomized experiment based on the introduction of the entreprenant legal status in Benin is used to test these assumptions, along with supplementary efforts to enhance the presumed benefits of formalizing to firms.

TL;DR: In this paper, a large-scale field experiment in the German labor market was conducted to investigate how information provision affects job seekers' employment prospects and labor market outcomes, and the results indicated that targeted information provision can be a highly effective policy tool in the labor market.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors assess the efficacy of messages related to penalty salience, punishment probability, compliance cost, and civic pride by evaluating the response to experimental mailings distributed by Detroit to 7142 suspected resident nonfilers.

TL;DR: The authors used data from the 2005 through 2011 American Community Survey to show how the average yearly increase in interior immigration enforcement over that period raised the likelihood of living in poverty of households with U.S. born children by 4%.

TL;DR: The authors studied the relationship among applicant characteristics, hiring outcomes, and job performance for teachers in the Washington DC Public Schools and found that academic background and screening measures strongly predict teacher job performance, suggesting considerable scope for improving schools via the selection process.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the long-run evolution of top wealth shares for the United Kingdom over a period from 1895 to the present and found that the UK went from being more unequal in terms of wealth than the US to being less unequal.

TL;DR: This paper found that increasing the visibility of tax delinquency status increased compliance by individuals who had debts below $2500, but had no significant effect on individuals with larger debt amounts, while information about the delinquency of neighbors had no effect on payment rates.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify conditions under which alternative elicitation formats are incentive compatible, using as examples open ended (OE) and payment card (PC) question formats, and then implement theory-informed value elicitations in the context of a flood control policy for New York City.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined firm behavior to taxation in a low enforcement and large informality setting, using quasi-experimental variation created by a tax reform, which increased taxation of partnerships substantially relative to firms of other legal form, and the population of income tax returns filed in Pakistan in 2006-11.

TL;DR: In this paper, the long-run fiscal consequences of balanced budget rules (BBR) that are enshrined in a country's constitution are studied, using historical data dating back to the 19th century and applying a difference-in-difference approach, and they find that the introduction of a constitutional-BBR reduces government debt to GDP and expenditure to GDP ratios by around 11 and 3 percentage points, respectively.

TL;DR: In this article, the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality in Sweden has been investigated, and the authors find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequality (e.g., the Gini coefficient falls by 5–10 percent) but absolute dispersion increases.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question and find an increase in tax-deductible private retirement savings and provide evidence that this is not due to crowding-out of other forms of savings.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate team behavior in repeated public goods games and use team chat logs to study motives for contribution, and find strong evidence of concern for repeated game effects and limited backward induction.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that a judiciously designed toll applied to a portion of the lanes of a highway can generate a Pareto improvement before using the revenue, a sufficient condition being that drivers with a high value of time travel at the peak of rush hour.