Download or read book Essays in Public Economics written by Matias Giaccobasso Amorena and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of a series of essays in public economics, development economics, labor economics, and behavioral economics, that provide a comprehensive illustration of the core of my research agenda. In the first paper, Ifocus on the transfer side of public economics. More specifically, I study the effects of a cash transfer program on individuals' transition to adulthood. In the second and third papers, I focus on the taxation side of public economics. In the second paper, I focus on top-income earners and how they react to a change in the top personal income tax rates. Finally, in the third paper, I focus on how individuals make their tax compliance decisions, in particular, in the role of tax morale mechanisms. Collectively, this series of essays contribute to building our understanding of how individuals interact with tax and transfer policies. Empirical evidence on these interactions are key inputs for the discussion of optimal policy design.

Download or read book Essays in Development and Public Economics written by Katy Ann Bergstrom and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, Essays in Development and Public Economics, comprises three chapters of theoretical and empirical research investigating various topics in development and public economics. The first chapter explores a new welfare benefit of imposing conditions to send children to school on cash transfers in developing countries. The second chapter develops a method to decompose income inequality into differences in individual productivities vs. differences in individual preferences for consumption relative to leisure. Finally, the third chapter investigates why parents may optimally invest more in their first child relative to their later-born children, focusing on the context of India.

Download or read book Essays in International Trade and Public Economics written by Margarita M. Kalamova and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2012 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays of this book are contributions to the empirical Literature in International Trade and Public Economics. They deal with the relationship between the structure and quality of the public sector and the process of economic integration. Two of the essays add to the empirical determinants of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) and to the numerous applications of the theory of government decentralization. Decentralization tends to discourage inward FDI and domestic trade and to increase imports and exports. A third essay focuses on the effect of governments' intangible assets - such as consumer perceptions about countries and products from these countries - on FDI. A country's nation brand is shown to have a significant and large positive effect on investment flows.

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics and Development written by Milad Khatib-Shahidi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics and Development written by Francois Gerard and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present thesis studies public economics questions in the context of developing countries. In particular, I investigate the impact and design of specific government policies in Brazil. Government interventions may be desirable when unregulated market economies deliver socially inefficient outcomes. Goods and services tend to be under-provided in the presence of imperfect or asymmetric information. Such market failures may be pervasive in the insurance market and prompt governments to provide certain types of insurance directly. Chapters 1 and 2 study social insurance programs, and more specifically unemployment insurance (UI). In contrast, goods and services tend to be over-provided if they generate negative externalities. In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in the negative externalities associated with energy consumption. Chapter 3 studies energy conservation policies, and more specifically residential electricity conservation. In each of the three essays, I develop a simple theoretical framework to guide my empirical analysis. I then estimate the relevant impacts and combine theory and empirics to inform the design of government programs. There is vast literature in public economics (and related fields) on social insurance programs and energy conservation policies. Yet, as for most research in public economics, existing work focuses almost entirely on the context of developed countries. Arguably, social insurance and energy conservation are not first-order priorities in least developed countries. However, these topics are becoming increasingly relevant for developing countries. Most of the growth in energy demand is forecast to come from the developing world, especially for residential consumers. Social insurance programs have been adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Currently some form of UI exists in Algeria, Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam; Mexico, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand have been considering its introduction. Moreover, the severe data constraints that limited empirical work at the intersection of public and development economics are being removed. Today, large administrative datasets and high-quality surveys are available in many developing countries. Importantly, results from more advanced countries are unlikely to translate easily to a developing country context. For instance, the enforcement of social program eligibility is a major challenge in developing countries where the informal sector accounts for a large share of the economy. In Brazil, about half of the employed population works in jobs that escape oversight and monitoring from the government. The presence of a large informal sector is widely believed to increase the efficiency costs of social programs. The main concern is that informal job opportunities exacerbate programs' disincentives to work in the formal sector. The essay in the first chapter (joint work with Gustavo Gonzaga) evaluates such a claim. We begin by developing a simple theoretical model of optimal UI that specifies the efficiency-insurance tradeoff in the presence of informal job opportunities. We then combine the model with evidence drawn from 15 years of uniquely comprehensive administrative data to quantify the social costs of the UI program in Brazil. We first show that exogenous extensions of UI benefits led to falls in formal-sector reemployment rates due to offsetting rises in informal employment. However, because reemployment rates in the formal sector are low, most of the extra benefits were actually received by claimants who did not change their employment behavior. Consequently, only a fraction of the cost of UI extensions was due to perverse incentive effects and the efficiency costs were thus relatively small (only 20% as large as in the US, for example). Using variation in the relative size of the formal sector across different regions and over time in Brazil, we then show that the efficiency costs of UI extensions are actually larger in regions with a larger formal sector. Finally, we show that UI exhaustees have relatively low levels of disposable income, suggesting that the insurance value of longer benefits in Brazil may be sizeable. In sum, the results overturn the conventional wisdom, and indicate that efficiency considerations may in fact become more relevant as the formal sector expands. The findings of this essay have broader implications for our understanding of social policies in developing countries. Many social programs and taxes generate incentives for people to carry out their economic activities informally. For the same reasons as for UI, they are viewed as imposing large efficiency costs in a context of high informality. By going against the conventional wisdom, our results cast doubt on whether efficiency considerations actually limit the expansion of social policies in these cases too. The essay in the second chapter (joint work with Gustavo Gonzaga) follows directly from the above results. Governments face two main informational constraints when implementing any program or regulation (e.g., welfare program). First, there is a screening issue. Government may fail to identify the ex-ante population of interest (e.g., poorest households). Second, there is a monitoring issue. Agents may adopt unobserved behaviors to join or escape the population of interest (e.g., reducing work efforts). The lack of strict monitoring policies for government programs is often considered to be a major issue in developing countries where non-compliance is widespread. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the magnitude of the behavioral responses that we wish to mitigate, relative to the cost of efficient monitoring policies. The Brazilian UI program offers a stark example of a weak monitoring environment. Until recently and for over 20 years, there was absolutely no monitoring of formal job search for UI beneficiaries in Brazil, even though many beneficiaries work informally when drawing UI benefits. In the second chapter, we argue that the results presented in the first chapter may rationalize the complete lack of monitoring in Brazil until 2011. We begin by deriving a theoretical upper bound for the maximum price that a government should be willing to pay per beneficiary to perfectly monitor the formal job search of UI beneficiaries. We show that the bound corresponds to the share of program costs due to behavioral responses. Intuitively, there is little incentive to introduce monitoring if most beneficiaries draw UI benefits without changing their formal reemployment behavior. The overall scope of the monitoring issue is thus limited in Brazil because most beneficiaries would collect UI benefits absent any behavioral response, as shown in the first chapter. Yet, monitoring policies may still be cost-effective if the government is able to target them towards workers with relatively larger behavioral responses. In the empirical analysis, we investigate to what extent the government could use information readily available ex ante (a signal) to identify worker categories with relatively larger behavioral responses. We find that most of the heterogeneity is not easily captured by observable characteristics. Therefore, monitoring policies would be relatively costly even if the government used available signals to target them efficiently. These results motivate future work on the cost-effectiveness of job-search requirements for UI beneficiaries, which have been recently introduced in Brazil. If there is little evidence on the impact of social insurance programs in developing countries, there is almost no evidence on the impact of energy conservation policies. Moreover, results from more advanced countries are also unlikely to translate easily to the context of developing countries. Households in the developing world own fewer appliances and consume much less energy on average. Average monthly residential electricity consumption in Brazil was below 200 kilowatt hours in 2000. Enforcement is also a major challenge. Electricity theft amounts to 15% of the total load for some utilities in Brazil. In the third chapter, I investigate the short- and long-term impacts on residential consumption of the largest electricity conservation program to date. This was an innovative program of economic (fines) and social (conservation appeals) incentives implemented by the Brazilian government in 2001-2002 in response to supply shortages of over 20%. Achieving ambitious energy conservation targets through economic incentives is often considered infeasible. Yet, there is little evidence from ambitious conservation policies. I find that the Brazilian conservation program reduced average electricity consumption per customer by .25 log point during the nine months of the crisis. Importantly, the program induced sizable lumpy adjustments; it reduced consumption by .12 log point until at least 2011. Using individual billing data from three million customers, I show that average effects came from dramatic reductions by most customers. I also provide suggestive evidence that lumpy adjustments came from new habits rather than physical investments. Finally, I structurally estimate a simple model to quantify the role of social incentives and lumpy adjustments. Social incentives amounted to a 1.2 log point increase in electricity tariffs, and may thus be particularly powerful in times of crisis. Importantly, a .6 log point permanent increase in tariffs would have been necessary to achieve the observed consumption levels during and after the crisis absent any lumpy adjustment. The possibility of triggering lumpy adjustments may thus substantially reduce the incentives necessary to achieve ambitious energy conservation targets. Beyond the specific issues it addresses, I hope that this dissertation will help convince senior and junior scholars alike of the relevance.

Download or read book Rethinking the Development Experience written by Donald A. Schon and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, written by a group of distinguished scholars and practitioners, critically reappraises ideas about learning and development advanced by Albert O. Hirschman in the 1950s and 1960s. The essays—prepared for an MIT faculty seminar—show how these innovative ideas bear on the theory, policy, and practice of development in the 1990s. Hirschman, one of the great pioneers in the field of economic development, is now professor emeritus at Princeton. Paul Krugman, Lance Taylor, and Donald Schon address the different approaches and assumptions of economic theorists in relation to modelling, learning, and development policy. Emma Rothschild, Lisa Peattie, and Bishwapryiya Sanyal examine some of the changing attitudes toward economic progress. Elliot Marseille, Judith Tendler, Sara Friedheim, Robert Picciotto, and Charles Sabel draw lessons from efforts to innovate or modify institutions, policies, programs, and projects. Lloyd Rodwin examines the underlying themes that emerge, particularly those that touch on the ideas of development as a process of social learning and on ways of strengthening theory, policy, and practice in economics when it is seen as both discipline and profession. In a postscript, Albert O. Hirschman reflects on the evolution of his ideas, his cognitive style, and his propensity for self-subversion. Two appendixes detail the candid seminar discussions and Hirschman's musings in response to particular chapters and questions raised by the participants.

Download or read book Essays in Development Economics Wealth and poverty written by Jagdish N. Bhagwati and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume I, Wealth and Poverty, addresses domestic or internal development problems.

Download or read book Essays on Development Economics and Public Economics written by Ruixin Wang and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Public Economics written by Christian Rafael Jaramillo Herrera and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Growth and Economic Development written by P. Arestis and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . this volume is a very good and important addition to economic growth and development. On the basis of authority, the selection is well-balanced. . . This book should be a mandatory textbook for graduate students in development economics, and essential reading for all policy-makers. Voxi Heinrich Amavilah, Progress in Development Studies This valuable and engaging new book bears eloquent testimony to A.P. Thirlwall s substantial contribution to economics over the last 40 years. The volume does not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of such a prolific figure, but rather demonstrates the considerable influence that his work on economic theory has had on his contemporaries, and the profession as a whole. From his early pioneering research in regional and labour economics to his more recent exploration of growth and development economics, leading experts in the field bear witness to the significant role he has played in the evolution of the discipline. In addressing some of the most pivotal aspects of his career, the contributors cover a range of topics including Thirlwall s Law , the application of Keynesian macroeconomic approaches, the General Theory within open economies, the connection between short-run cycles and long-run growth, endogenous growth theory, the Stability and Growth Pact, as well as broader development issues and problems. In championing Thirlwall s challenging work, this volume provides a lively and comprehensive account of some of the most important areas of economics today. This book will prove an essential read for academics and policy makers alike who are interested in trade, growth and development economics.

Download or read book Essays in Development and Public Economics Savings Information and Formalization written by Albrecht Bohne and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics and Political Economy written by Maxim L. Pinkovskiy and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies topics in public economics in developed and developing countries, including health insurance regulation, public goods provision and inequality and welfare measurement. The first chapter analyzes the impacts of the managed care backlash in the United States on health care costs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During the late 1990s, most U.S. states passed a variety of laws in this period that restricted the cost-cutting measures that managed care organizations (HMOs, PPOs and others) could use. I exploit panel variation in the passage of these regulations across states and over time to investigate the effects of the managed care backlash, as proxied by this legislation, on health care cost growth. I find that the backlash had a strong effect on health care costs, and can statistically explain much of the rise in health spending as a share of U.S. GDP between 1993 and 2005 (amounting to 1% - 1.5% of GDP). I also investigate the effects of the managed care backlash on intensity of care, hospital salaries and technology adoption. I conclude that managed care was largely successful in keeping health care costs on a sustainable path relative to the size of the economy. The second chapter attempts to quantify the impact of differences in political factors on economic growth and development, and specifically, assess to what extent variation in public goods provision may be responsible for cross-country differences in income and growth rates. Using a new methodology for the computation of standard errors in a regression discontinuity design with infill asymptotics, I document the existence of discontinuities in the levels and growth of the amount of satellite-recorded light per capita across national borders. Both the amount of lights per capita and its growth rate are shown to increase discontinuously upon crossing a border from a poorer (or lower-growing) into a richer (or higher-growing) country. I argue that these discontinuities form lower bounds for discontinuities in economic activity across borders, which suggest the importance of national-level variables such as institutions and culture relative to local-level variables such as geography for the determination of income and growth. I find that institutions of private property are helpful in explaining differences in growth between two countries at the border, while contracting institutions, local and national levels of public goods, as well as education and cultural variables, are not. The last chapter of my thesis, which I have published in the Journal of Public Economics, investigates the dynamics of the world distribution of income using more robust methods than those in the previous literature. I derive sharp bounds on the Atkinson inequality index for a country's income distribution that are valid for any underlying distribution of income conditional on given fractile shares and Gini coefficient. I apply these bounds to calculate the envelope of possible time paths for global inequality and welfare in the last 40 years. While the bounds are too wide to reject the hypothesis that world inequality may have risen, I show that world welfare rose unambiguously between 1970 and 2006. This conclusion is valid for alternative methods of dealing with countries and years with missing surveys, alternative survey harmonization procedures, alternative GDP series, or if the inequality surveys used systematically underreport the income of the very rich, or suffer from nonresponse bias.

Download or read book Conflict Demand and Economic Development written by Deepankar Basu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive overview of three key areas: heterodox macroeconomics, development economics and classical political economy. It offers an alternative macroeconomic framework to analyse policies with an emphasis on issues of equity and justice. With contributions by leading economists from across the world, it examines the growth and distribution of income; trade and finance in developing countries; classical political economy and Marxist theory; dualism in the US economy; economic crisis; and agrarian economy in poor countries. It explores themes such as the effect of an exogenous shock to wage share; Harrodian instability and Steindlian solutions; economics and politics of social democracy; the role of power in the macroeconomy; economic development through the promotion of domestic value chains; and reflections on primitive accumulation. Going beyond the neo-classical tradition, the volume opens up a new vista of economics by discussing unexplored questions. It provides a refreshing treatment of time-tested ideas as well as discussions of recent developments and current research. A major intervention in heterodox macroeconomics and a tribute to macroeconomist Amit Bhaduri, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of economics, political economy, development studies, sociology, political science, public administration, economic theory, economic history, economic geography and critical studies, as well as professionals, economists and policymakers.

Download or read book Equity and Efficiency in Economic Development written by Benjamin Howard Higgins and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1992 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the collapse of Eastern European socialism may favour ideological convergence between divergent economic systems and lead to blend of market and planned systems capable to deal with the varying conditions of diverse societies.

Download or read book Essays on Developing Economies written by Michał Kalecki and published by Hassocks, Eng. : Harvester Press ; Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Public Choice and Economic Development written by Ning Xue and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics written by Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is a collection of essays written in preparation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Economics. The essays are grouped into three parts that address three areas of public economics. Part I, On the Effects of Government Spending at the Local Level, includes two chapters co-authored with Philippe Wingender that analyze the effects of government spending at the local level. These chapters propose and exploit a new identification strategy to measure the causal impact of government spending on the economy. In Chapter 2 we use this strategy to estimate the short term effects of government spending at the local level. Our estimates imply that government spending has a local income multiplier of 1.88 and an estimated cost per job of $30,000 per year. In Chapter 3 we analyze the economic incidence of sustained changes in federal government spending at the local level. We develop a spatial equilibrium model to show that when workers value publicly-provided goods, a change in government spending at the local level will affect equilibrium wages through shifts in both the labor demand and supply curves. Our estimates of this model conclude that an additional dollar of government spending increases welfare by $1.45 in the median county. Part II, On Behavioral Responses to Taxation, includes two chapters that analyze how the behavior of private agents responds to tax incentives. In Chapter 4 we study how individuals respond to non-linear taxes. We use a laboratory experiment to document and characterize a behavioral deviation from the standard economic model and argue that this deviation from the rational benchmark has important consequences for the welfare analysis of non-linear pricing schemes and non-linear taxes as well as for policies that advocate the provision of information regarding marginal incentives. In Chapter 5 we study how entrepreneurs organize their firms and how taxation might influence this choice. We focus on the dynamic choice of organizational form for startup firms and we quantify the impacts of tax and non-tax advantages of incorporation. Results from estimating a dynamic discrete choice model showthat static models underestimate fixed costs of reorganization while overestimating the non- tax advantages of incorporation. The revised estimates also lead to a substantive downward revision of the risk-taking incentive inherent in the flexibility to change organizational forms. Part III, On Applied Econometrics, is composed of a single chapter co-authored with Charlie Gibbons and Mike Urbancic and addresses the use of fixed effects in applied econo- metrics. Though common in the applied literature, it is known that fixed effects regressions with a constant treatment effect generally do not consistently estimate the sample-weighted treatment effect. Chapter 6 demonstrates the extent of the difference between the fixed effect estimate and the sample-weighted effect by replicating nine influential papers from the American Economic Review.