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Full-Text Articles in Income Distribution

Optimal Social Insurance With Informal Child Care, Christine Ho Mar 2019

Optimal Social Insurance With Informal Child Care, Christine Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

The possibility of engaging in household child care may exacerbate the incentives of parents and grandparents to falsely claim disability benefits as households also get to save on formal child care costs. This paper considers a multi-generational family model with persistence in privately observed shocks and presents an efficient implementation case for subsidizing formal child care costs of the disabled. An implementation of the optimal scheme that consists of capped formal day care subsidies, non-linear income taxation and asset-testing is proposed. Simulations based on a parametrization that targets key features of the US labor and child care markets suggest that …


Innovation, Firm Size Distribution, And Gains From Trade, Yi-Fan Chen, Wen-Tai Hsu, Shin-Kun Peng Sep 2018

Innovation, Firm Size Distribution, And Gains From Trade, Yi-Fan Chen, Wen-Tai Hsu, Shin-Kun Peng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study a trade model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003) that is standard except that firm heterogeneity is endogenously determined by firms innovating to enhance their productivities. We show that the equilibrium productivity and firm-size distributions exhibit power-law tails under rather general conditions on demand and technology. In particular, the emergence of the power laws is essentially independent of the underlying primitive heterogeneity among firms. We investigate the model’s welfare implications, and conduct a quantitative analysis of welfare gains from trade. We find that, conditional on the same trade elasticity and values of the common parameters, our model …


The Impact Of The Cost Of Car Ownership On House Price Gradient In Singapore, Naqun Huang, Jing Li, Amanda Ross Jan 2018

The Impact Of The Cost Of Car Ownership On House Price Gradient In Singapore, Naqun Huang, Jing Li, Amanda Ross

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the extent to which a change in the cost of car ownership affects the house price gradient with respect to distance from the central business district (CBD). Theory suggests that if the cost of car ownership increases, then people will shift towards other modes of transportation, thus reducing house prices farther away from the CBD. However, the cost of car ownership is likely to be endogenous and correlated with various unobserved factors that also contribute to a change in the house price gradient. To obtain causal effects, we exploit a unique feature of Singapore’s car registration process. …