Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Investor Valuations Of Japan's Adoption Of A Territorial Tax Regime: Quantifying The Direct And Competitive Effects Of International Tax Reform, Sebastien J. Bradley, Estelle Dauchy, Makoto Hasegawa

Sebastien J Bradley

Liquidity Policies And Financial Fragility, Danilo Lopomo Beteto Wegner

Danilo Lopomo Beteto Wegner

Cross-Country Heterogeneity In Students’ Reporting Behavior: The Use Of The Anchoring Vignette Method, Hana Vonkova, Gema Zamarro, Collin Hitt

Gema Zamarro

Persistence In Industrial Policy Impacts: Evidence From Depression-Era Mississippi, Matthew Freedman

Matthew Freedman

Immigration, Employment Opportunities, And Criminal Behavior, Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens, Sarah Bohn

Matthew Freedman

The Urban Density Premium Across Establishments, R. Jason Faberman, Matthew Freedman

Matthew Freedman

Round-Tripping Of Domestic Profits Under The American Jobs Creation Act Of 2004, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

Tax Incentives And Housing Investment In Low-Income Neighborhoods, Matthew Freedman

Matthew Freedman

This paper examines how tax incentives to promote housing investment affect communities by exploiting the lottery structure of Missouri’s Neighborhood Preservation Act (NPA). The NPA offers tax credits to homeowners and developers that improve or expand the owner-occupied housing stock in low-income areas. Taking advantage of the random assignment of NPA tax credits and detailed property-level data, I find that the program increases construction activity modestly. There are positive but highly localized spillovers on neighbors’ investment behavior. Spillovers on property values are larger in geographic scope, implying important roles for both neighbor interactions and amenity effects in local housing markets.

The Intergenerational Transmission Of Noncognitive Skills And Their Effect On Education And Employment Outcomes, Ildefonso Mendez, Gema Zamarro

Gema Zamarro

We analyze the existence of a cultural component on the formation process of noncognitive skills and we test for whether it affects education and employment outcomes in adulthood. We compare adult outcomes of U.S. second-generation immigrant groups differing in their cultural heritage. We consider two measures of noncognitive skills: country differences in personality traits that children are encouraged to learn at home and civic capital (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2010). We find that individuals whose cultural heritage places a higher value on hard work as a quality to encourage in children report higher education, better occupational status and higher wages …

Finance For All: The Impact Of Financial Literacy Training In Compulsory Secondary Education In Spain, Laura Hospido, Ernesto Villanueva, Gema Zamarro

Gema Zamarro

We estimate the impact on objective measures of financial literacy of a 10-hours financial education program among 15-year old students in compulsory secondary schooling. We use a matched sample of students and teachers in Madrid and two different estimation strategies. Firstly, we use reweighting estimators to compare the performance in a test of financial knowledge of students in treatment and control schools. In another specification, we use school fixed-effect estimates of the effect of the course on change in the score in tests of financial knowledge. The program increased treated students' financial knowledge by between one fourth and one third …

Benefit Transfer Combining Revealed And Stated Preference Data: Nourishment And Retreat Options For Delaware Bay Beaches, Robert J. Johnston, Mahesh Ramachadran, George R. Parsons

George Parsons

Who Benefits From Environmental Regulation? Evidence From The Clean Air Act Amendments [Online Appendix], Antonio Bento, Matthew Freedman, Corey Lang

Corey Lang

Online appendix for "Who Benefits from Environmental Regulation? Evidence from the Clean Air Act Amendments" (with Antonio Bento and Corey Lang).

Click here for the paper.

Investor Responses To Dividends Received Deductions: Rewarding Multinational Tax Avoidance?, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

Central to the debate over U.S. international tax reform is understanding how multinational tax avoidance behavior might respond to a reduction in taxes on repatriated foreign-source earnings. Beginning in early 2009, several attempts have been made to re-institute a temporary 85 percent dividends received deduction that would have reduced such taxes for U.S. multinational corporations. Despite an intense lobbying effort, the measure was ultimately cast aside in late 2011, temporarily yielding to the criticism, in part, that the original such provision enacted under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 offered a generous reward for international tax avoidance. Exploiting the …

Property Tax Salience And Payment Delinquency, Sebastien J. Bradley

Sebastien J Bradley

Despite only modest supporting evidence, shocks to households' personal finances are commonly cited as one of the principal causes of homeowner defaults. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which different component sources of annual variation in property tax obligations influence the probability and magnitude of property tax delinquency|a precursor to mortgage default. Under Michigan's system of property tax limitations, rational homeowners should readily anticipate changes in tax liability, making such changes an unlikely cause of delinquency, regardless of the underlying source. Looking at tax payment records for the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan for the period 2006-2009, I …

Why The Rich Drink More But Smoke Less: The Impact Of Wealth On Health Behaviors, Hans Van Kippersluis, Titus Galama

Titus Galama

Wealthier individuals engage in healthier behavior. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by developing a theory of health behavior, and exploiting both lottery winnings and inheritances to test the theory. We distinguish between the direct monetary cost and the indirect health cost (value of health lost) of unhealthy consumption. The health cost increases with wealth and the degree of unhealthiness, leading wealthier individuals to consume more healthy and moderately unhealthy, but fewer severely unhealthy goods. The empirical evidence presented suggests that differences in health costs may indeed provide an explanation for behavioral differences, and ultimately health outcomes, between wealth …

Demonstrations And Price Competition In New Product Release, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton, Haresh Gurnani

Raphael Boleslavsky

We develop a game theoretic model of price competition in which an innovating firm can offer product demonstrations. Placing minimal restriction on the firm's ability to design demonstrations, we show that the equilibrium demonstration resolves some but not all customer valuation uncertainty and allows the innovating firm to attract customers while maintaining a high price. Consumer surplus may be lower with endogenous demonstrations than without demonstrations. Regulation requiring firms to provide fully-informative demonstrations (e.g., generous return policies or inspection periods) can further reduce consumer surplus. The ability to design demonstrations also creates incentives for innovating firms to limit the market …

Selloffs, Bailouts, And Feedback: Can Asset Markets Inform Policy?, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly, Curtis R. Taylor

Raphael Boleslavsky

We present a model in which a policymaker observes trade in a financial asset before deciding whether to intervene in the economy, for example by offering a bailout or monetary stimulus. Because an intervention erodes the value of private information, informed investors are reluctant to take short positions and selloffs are, therefore, less likely and less informative. The policymaker faces a tradeoff between eliciting information from the asset market and using the information so obtained. In general she can elicit more information if she commits to intervene only infrequently. She thus may benefit from imperfections in the intervention process or …

Marginal Versus Average Effective Tax Rates And Foreign Direct Investment, Matt Krzepkowski

Matt Krzepkowski

This paper investigates the influence of two types of calculated effective tax rates on foreign direct investment inflows. I take advantage of the fact the average effective tax rate can be decomposed of as a weighted average of the statutory corporate income tax rate and the marginal effective tax rate to identify which tax affects investment inflows. Using a calculated marginal effective tax rate for a diverse set of 80 countries from 2005-2009, the paper shows that taxes other than the statutory tax rate have a strong effect on encouraging foreign investment. Separating out components of the marginal and average …

Does Mandatory Diversion To Drug Treatment Eliminate Racial Disparities In The Incarceration Of Drug Offenders? An Examination Of California's Prop 36, Nancy Nicosia, John Macdonald, Rosalie Pacula

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Treasury Auction Announcements On Interest Rates: 1990-1999, James Forest

James J Forest

In this study we examine the secondary-market response of U.S. Treasury interest rates to both the release of pre-auction auction supply announcements and post-auction details from U.S. Treasury auctions during the period of the 1990s. Rate changes are found to differ significantly on auction days. Pre-auction announcements of auction volumes are shown to affect rates significantly, in contrast with the findings of Wachtel and Young (1987) with respect to deficit announcements. We find that surprises in the release of bid-to-cover ratios affect Treasury rates significantly, while the surprises in the volume of noncompetitive bids appears to have little affect on …

Empirical Evidence For Decreasing Returns To Scale In A Health Capital Model, Titus Galama, Patrick Hullegie, Meijer Erik, Sarah Outcault

Titus Galama

We estimate a health investment equation, derived from a health capital model that is an extension of the well-known Grossman model. Of particular interest is whether the health production function has constant returns to scale, as in the standard Grossman model, or decreasing returns to scale, as in the Ehrlich-Chuma model and extensions thereof. The model with decreasing returns to scale has a number of theoretically and empirically desirable characteristics that the constant returns model does not have. Although our empirical equation does not point-identify the decreasing returns to scale curvature parameter, it does allow us to test for constant …

Buying Anonymity: An Investigation Of Petroleum And Natural Gas Lease Auctions, Jennifer Winter

Jennifer Winter

Higher winning bids are associated with the use of brokers. The use of brokers is persistent and geographically concentrated.

Estimating The Credibility Of The Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation's Threat To Nationalize Oil Resources In Saskatchewan, Jennifer Winter, Herb Emery

Jennifer Winter

Expropriation in Saskatchewan did not reduce investment in exploration and development, but did reduce the price paid for mineral rights relative to Alberta.

Labor Market Analysis For Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper is about analyzing labor markets in developing countries, searching for both improved understanding and greater policy relevance. Following a five-part policy evaluation framework, the highlights of labor markets in developing countries are presented. Theoretical models with multiple sectors and segments and empirical analysis using different kinds of data are then reviewed. A brief concluding section addresses some priority research needs.

Reflections On My Immersion In India, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Kalavati’s family derives all of its money from labor earnings. Her husband long ago worked for the Cannon textile mills when they were still making bath towels in India. Sixteen years earlier, the mill shut down, moving to a place where labor was even cheaper, and her husband lost his job. For fifteen years, he did not work. Then finally, he got a job where he works at night. He does not tell Kalavati where he works or how much he earns, nor does he contribute his earnings to the day-to-day expenses. (He does contribute to interest payments to …

Poverty Effects Of The Minimum Wage: The Role Of Household Employment Composition, Gary S. Fields, Baran Han, Ravi Kanbur

Gary S Fields

A change in a country’s minimum wage will in general affect the number of workers in covered sector employment, uncovered sector employment, and unemployment. The impact of these labor market adjustments on absolute poverty will depend on how the pattern of employment composition changes within households and on how income is shared within households. An earlier paper (Fields and Kanbur, 2007) focused on the income-sharing dimension of the problem. The present paper focuses on household employment composition. For a particular structure of the labor market— one with good jobs, bad jobs, unemployment, and adult and youth workers— and with a …

What We Know (And Want To Know) About Earnings Mobility In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] Some developing countries have experienced rapid economic growth, some slow economic growth, some no growth at all, and some economic decline. The traditional way of gauging the distributional consequences of economic growth, if in fact there was economic growth, is to use data from comparable cross sections to calculate various measures of (relative) inequality and (absolute) poverty. The very large literature on inequality and poverty will not be reviewed here. A newer approach in the development literature is to study the distributional consequences of economic growth (or non-growth) by using data for the same recipient units for two or …

Poverty And Low Earnings In The Developing World, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

More than three billion people are poor by international standards, and essentially all are to be found in the low- and middle-income countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The issues for understanding poverty in the developing world - among them, self-employment and household enterprises, agricultural work, casual employment, and informal work – differ from those in the developed world. Different policy issues predominate: stimulating economic growth, harnessing the energies of the private sector, increasing paid employment, and raising the returns to self-employment. This chapter details how the poorer half of the world’s people work and gives an overview of …

But That’S Not What Economic Mobility Is!, Gary Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] How many times have you attended a talk or read a paper on economic mobility and thought, “What you are talking about is not what I am interested in”? Not only do different people have different ideas about what economic mobility is, but they have different clear ideas about what economic mobility is. The purpose of this paper is to present the essential features of the different economic mobility concepts that are found in the literature.

Family Labor Participation And Child Care Decisions: The Role Of Grannies, Gema Zamarro

Gema Zamarro

One of the most significant long term trends in the labor market in most OECD countries has been the increase in the proportion of working mothers. However, not all countries show the same pattern. Countries in Southern Europe (Italy, Greece and Spain) show an average participation rate of about 45% whereas the participation rates in Northern countries (Denmark, Sweden) are around 75%. The characteristics of child care systems also differ significantly across OECD countries. This along with the characteristics of the labor market may have led families to get the necessary social services in an alternative way, i.e. through grandmothers. …