Download or read book Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis written by Raj Chetty and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debate between "structural" and "reduced-form" approaches has generated substantial controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public economics that combines the advantages of reduced-form strategies -- transparent and credible identification -- with an important advantage of structural models -- the ability to make predictions about counterfactual outcomes and welfare. This recent work has developed formulas for the welfare consequences of various policies that are functions of high-level elasticities rather than deep primitives. These formulas provide theoretical guidance for the measurement of treatment effects using program evaluation methods. I present a general framework that shows how many policy questions can be answered by identifying a small set of sufficient statistics. I use this framework to synthesize the modern literature on taxation, social insurance, and behavioral welfare economics. Finally, I discuss topics in labor economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics that can be tackled using the sufficient statistic approach.

Download or read book Are Sufficient Statistics Necessary written by David S. Lee and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary "decomposition" approach that compares the behavioral and mechanical components of a policy's total impact on the government budget to study the deadweight loss of two unemployment insurance policies. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates using state administrative data show that increasing the weekly benefit is more efficient (with a fiscal externality of 53 cents per dollar of mechanical transferred income) than reducing the program's implicit earnings tax.

Download or read book The Welfare Economics of Reference Dependence written by Daniel Reck and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical evidence suggests that individuals often evaluate options relative to a reference point, especially seeking to avoid losses. We undertake the first welfare analysis under reference-dependent preferences. We characterize the welfare impact of changes in reference points and prices, decomposing these into direct and behavioral effects. The sign of direct and behavioral effects depends on the form of reference-dependent payoffs; which of these effects matter for welfare depends on whether reference dependence reflects a bias or a normative preference. We derive sufficient statistics formulas quantifying the social welfare effects of changes in reference points and prices in terms of estimable reduced-form parameters and normative judgments. We illustrate these findings with an empirical application to reference dependence exhibited in German workers' retirement decisions. We find positive social welfare effects of increasing the Normal Retirement Age, but ambiguous effects of financial incentives to postpone retirement.

Download or read book Welfare Analysis of Changing Notches written by Katy Bergstrom and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper develops a framework to bound the welfare impacts of reforms to notches using two sufficient statistics: (1) the number of households bunching at the old notch who move toward the new notch, and (2) the number of households who "jump" down to the new notch. The bounds hold in a wide class of models, highlighting a new way to use reduced-form bunching evidence for welfare analysis without strong assumptions on the economic environment. These two statistics are estimated using a difference-in-difference strategy for a reform to the anti-poverty program Bolsa Familia, finding that the reform's marginal value of public funds lies between 0.90 and 1.12.

Download or read book Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Implications of Tariff Raise with Noncompliance written by Kowsar Yousefi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of Illegal trade on welfare is vastly investigated in different theoretical models. We add to this literature by introducing exempt-tariff imports, known as tariff avoidance. Moreover, we utilize our model with an empirical quantification. Our model assumes a small open economy in which agents can endogenously choose between three methods of importing: legally with paying tariffs, legally exempted imports, and illegal trading. Those agents who seek for exemptions or illegal methods burden with opportunity cost, while illegal trading incorporates an additional cost of auditing. We solve the model for equilibriums with and without the two types of tariff noncompliance (i.e., exemption and illegal trade), and obtain sufficient statistics for welfare analysis in each set of results. Results indicate that in equilibrium without illegal trade, the elasticity of tariff-paid import is sufficient to calculate welfare loss associate with tariff raise. Same statistics is sufficient if the economy burdens with exemption. However, with illegal trade, the statistics depends on a weighted average of tariff-paid imports, exempted imports and aggregate imports. Weights are determined by the resource cost associated with the noncompliance. We quantify our theoretical results by using a disaggregated dataset of trade in an economy where both types of noncompliance are responsive to tariff changes. Results indicate that a 1 unit tariff rise reduces welfare by 6%, or 3.6 billion dollar out of total of 60 billion dollar annual imports.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Agricultural Economics written by Gail L. Cramer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook offers an up-to-date collection of research on agricultural economics. Drawing together scholarship from experts at the top of their profession and from around the world, this collection provides new insights into the area of agricultural economics. The Routledge Handbook of Agricultural Economics explores a broad variety of topics including welfare economics, econometrics, agribusiness, and consumer economics. This wide range reflects the way in which agricultural economics encompasses a large sector of any economy, and the chapters present both an introduction to the subjects as well as the methodology, statistical background, and operations research techniques needed to solve practical economic problems. In addition, food economics is given a special focus in the Handbook due to the recent emphasis on health and feeding the world population a quality diet. Furthermore, through examining these diverse topics, the authors seek to provide some indication of the direction of research in these areas and where future research endeavors may be productive. Acting as a comprehensive, up-to-date, and definitive work of reference, this Handbook will be of use to researchers, faculty, and graduate students looking to deepen their understanding of agricultural economics, agribusiness, and applied economics, and the interrelationship of those areas.

Download or read book Welfare Effects of the Federal Crop Insurance Program written by Jialing Yu and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publicly subsidized Federal Crop Insurance Program has expanded rapidly in recent decades in the United States. With the reform in the 2014 Farm Bill, the Federal Crop Insurance Program has become the most important component of U.S. farm policies. The primary goal of the program is to provide risk protections for farmers. However, there is sporadic evidence of welfare costs associated with the program due to moral hazard, adverse selection, deadweight loss from the subsidy transfer and transaction costs. To provide a complete and systematic assessment, it requires a thorough theoretical understandings and credible empirical measurement of the welfare effect of the Federal Crop Insurance Program. We apply the sufficient statistics approach to consolidate various welfare effects of crop insurance and to provide quantitative evidence for the welfare analysis. We analyze a model in a setting where information asymmetry and systemic risk form an adverse environment for private sectors to provide insurance and therefore create a need for government intervention. From the model, we derive the condition for optimal contract and identify key parameters that affect the welfare effects of risk protection, information asymmetry, and premium subsidy. The results not only provide policy implications and but also suggest the key parameters needed for measuring the welfare effect of publically provided crop insurance programs empirically. To measure the welfare effect of the Federal Crop Insurance Program, we need to understand how the program affects the distribution of revenue. To this end, a moment-based approach is used to estimate the reduced-form equations of the first two moments of revenue distributions using farm-level Agricultural Census data from the U.S. Heartland region for 2002, 2007 and 2012. The control function approach is applied to control for the endogeneity problem caused by the self-selection of insurance coverage, under the assumption that selection into different coverage level is based on a set of observed covariates and time-invariant factors. Our results show that increase in coverage level is associated with a lower mean and higher variability of farm revenue per acre. The impacts of insurance coverage on the revenue distribution, as a reduced-form representation of the moral hazard, suggest a welfare loss. Other key parameters affecting marginal welfare effects of the Federal Crop Insurance Program include risk attitude parameters, insurance demand elasticity with respect to price, the impacts of insurance coverage on the production outcomes, marginal welfare cost of deadweight loss, and loading factors. We collect the information on the range of the values of these parameters from existing literatures. The Bootstrap method is applied to estimate marginal welfare effects discussed in the conceptual model. The results suggest that under the current policy setting, the net marginal welfare effects of coverage level and subsidy rate are both negative, suggesting that both the coverage level and the subsidy rate are greater than their optimal level. However, from farmers’ perspectives, the current risk protection level is appropriate.

Download or read book The Nonparametric Approach to Applied Welfare Analysis written by Donald J. Brown and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Costs of Taxation and the Marginal Cost of Funds written by Mr.Joel Slemrod and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1995-08-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is argued that taxation causes three kinds of deadweight losses and two types of direct costs. The deadweight losses arise from substitution, evasion, and avoidance activities while the direct costs are administrative and compliance costs. Some of these social costs tend to be discontinuous and/or nonconvex. Because most models of taxation ignore some components of the social costs of taxation, their conclusions cannot be of a general nature. An alternative approach to policy evaluation is to rely on a marginal efficiency cost of funds rule which can indicate appropriate directions of reforms. The paper discusses its merits, applicability, and limitations, as well as its relationship to other concepts.

Download or read book Handbook of Public Economics written by Alan J. Auerbach and published by Newnes. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Handbook of Public Economics, vol. 5, top scholars provide context and order to new research about mechanisms that underlie both public finance theories and applications. These fundamental subjects follow the recent, steady movement away from rational decision-making and toward more personalized approaches to tax generation and expenditure, especially in terms of the use of psychological methods and financial incentives. Closely scrutinized subjects include new research in empirical (instead of theoretical) public finance, the methods for measuring taxes (both in revenue generation and expenditure), and the roles that taxes play in specific settings, such as emerging economies, urban settings, charitable giving, and among political entities (cities, counties, states, countries). Contributors look at both the "tax" and "expenditure" sides of public finance, emphasizing recent influences that psychology and philosophy have exerted in economics with articles on behavioral finance, charitable giving, and dynamic taxation. To a field enjoying rapid growth, their articles bring context and order, illuminating the mechanisms that underlie both public finance theories and applications. - Editor Raj Chetty is the recipient of the 2013 John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association - Focuses on new approaches to both revenue generation and expenditures in public finance - Presents coherent summaries of subjects in public economics that stretch from methodologies to applications - Makes details about public economics accessible to scholars in fields outside economics

Download or read book Welfare Estimates of Shifting Peak Travel written by Robert W. Hahn and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We develop novel estimates of peak and off-peak price elasticities for urban mass transit demand in San Francisco using a large natural experiment with 3.6 million trip sessions and a natural field experiment that both have exogenous price subsidies. We then estimate the welfare impacts for these price subsidies using a sufficient statistics approach. Our analysis suggests that off-peak subsidies can increase welfare, but the positive effects are reduced when consumers take the decisions of others into account compared to when they do not. We also find a large variation in the welfare impacts of shifting travel to different periods, which is explained by differences in demand and congestion characteristics. Finally, we show that the targeting of subsidies can increase welfare, but need not do so if the regulator does not have accurate information on demand.

Download or read book Watch What They Do Not What They Say Estimating Regulatory Costs from Revealed Preferences written by Adrien Alvero and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We show that distortion in the size distribution of banks around regulatory thresholds can be used to identify costs of bank regulation. We build a structural model in which banks can strategically bunch their assets below regulatory thresholds to avoid regulations. The resulting distortion in the size distribution of banks reveals the magnitude of regulatory costs. Using U.S. bank data, we estimate the regulatory costs imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act. Although the estimated regulatory costs are substantial, they are significatnly lower than those in self-reported estimates by banks.

Download or read book Handbook of Environmental Economics written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook in Environmental Economics, Volume 4, the latest in this ongoing series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting timely chapters on Modeling Ecosystems and Economic Systems, Framing Sustainability Policy Questions: Who Leads – Ecology or Economics?, Valuing Natural Capital Within an Integrated Economic Ecological, Developing Economies, Urbanization, Climate Change and Health, Viewing Environmental Policy Instruments for Domestic and International Perspective, Quasi experimental Estimation of Environmental Policies, Environment Macro, The Rules for Formal and Informal Institutions in Managing Environmental Resources, and How Should Uncertainty Be Integrated into the Methods for Policy Evaluation? - Answers key policy questions facing environmental agencies in developed and developing economies - Integrates insights from economics and ecology as part of several key chapters - Presents the latest on efforts to review and evaluate the new literatures on field and quasi experiments in environmental economics - Provides the first substantive review of environmental macro economics

Download or read book Public Finance with Behavioural Agents written by Raphaël Lardeux and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in behavioural economics have deeply influenced the way governments design public policies. They give citizens access to online simulators to cope with tax and benefits systems and increasingly rely on nudges to guide individual decisions. The recent surge of interest in Behavioural Public Finance is grounded on the conviction that a better understanding of individual behaviours could improve predictions of tax revenue and help design better-suited incentives to save for retirement, search for a new job, go to school or seek medical attention. Through a presentation of the most recent developments in Behavioural Public Finance, this Element discusses the way Behavioural Economics has improved our understanding of fiscal policies.

Download or read book The Statistical Analysis of Categorical Data written by Erling B. Andersen and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analisi : STATISTICA. Teoria. ECONOMETRIA. Teoria.

Download or read book The New Generation of Computable General Equilibrium Models written by Federico Perali and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers some important topics in the construction of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models and examines use of these models for the analysis of economic policies, their properties, and their implications. Readers will find explanation and discussion of the theoretical structure and practical application of several model typologies, including dynamic, stochastic, micro-macro, and simulation models, as well as different closure rules and policy experiments. The presentation of applications to various country and problem-specific case studies serves to provide an informed and clearly articulated summary of the state of the art and the most important methodological advancements in the field of policy modeling within the framework of general equilibrium analysis. The book is an outcome of a recent workshop of the Italian Development Economists Association attended by a group of leading practitioners involved in the generation of CGE models and research on modeling the economy and policy making. It will be of interest to researchers, professional economists, graduate students, and knowledgeable policy makers.

Download or read book Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Empirical Microeconomics written by Hashimzade, Nigar and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in a comprehensive yet accessible style, this Handbook introduces readers to a range of modern empirical methods with applications in microeconomics, illustrating how to use two of the most popular software packages, Stata and R, in microeconometric applications.