Journal of Public Economics 2024年 11月刊 目录与摘要
刊发卷期：Volume 239
刊发时间：November 2024
期刊等级：ABS 3
出版厂商：Elsevier
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目录
1.Payroll tax incidence: Evidence from unemployment insurance
Audrey Guo
2.Willingness to pay for crime reduction: The role of information in the Americas
Patricio Domínguez, Carlos Scartascini
3.How does parental divorce affect children’s long-term outcomes?
Wolfgang Frimmel, Martin Halla, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer
4.How fiscally autonomous are local governments? An empirical test
Nicola Mauri
5.Women’s economic empowerment and intimate partner violence
Sanna Bergvall
6.Intrahousehold inequality and the joint taxation of household earnings
Cassiano B. Alves, Carlos E. da Costa, Felipe Lobel, Humberto Moreira
7.The children of HOPE VI demolitions: National evidence on labor market outcomes
John C. Haltiwanger, Mark J. Kutzbach, Giordano Palloni, Henry O. Pollakowski, Matthew Staiger, Daniel H. Weinberg
8.Do renewable energy investments create local jobs?
Natalia Fabra, Eduardo Gutiérrez, Aitor Lacuesta, Roberto Ramos
9.The price and employment response of firms to the introduction of minimum wages
Sebastian Link
10.Listen to her: Gender differences in information diffusion within the household
Dietmar Fehr, Johanna Mollerstrom, Ricardo Perez-Truglia
11.The impact of monitoring on politicians’ attendance: Evidence from the Swiss Upper House
Katharina E. Hofer, Mariana Lopes da Fonseca
12.Paving the road to re-election
Camille Boudot-Reddy, André Butler
13.The impossible trinity: Competitive markets, free entry, and efficiency
Halvor Mehlum, Gisle J. Natvik, Ragnar Torvik
14.Should I Stay (in School) or Should I Go (to Work)
Lee Tyrrell-Hendry
15.Race-blind admissions, school segregation, and student outcomes
Jason Cook
16.The unintended consequences of merit-based teacher selection: Evidence from a large-scale reform in Colombia
Matias Busso, Sebastián Montaño, Juan Muñoz-Morales, Nolan G. Pope
17.The importance of schools in driving children’s applications for disability benefits
Michael Levere, Jeffrey Hemmeter, David Wittenburg
18.Consumption tax cuts vs stimulus payments
Mehdi Bartal, Yvan Becard
19.Toward an understanding of tax amnesty take-up: Evidence from a natural field experiment
Patricia Gil, Justin Holz, John A. List, Andrew Simon, Alejandro Zentner
20.The economic consequences of being widowed by war: A life-cycle perspective
Sebastian T. Braun, Jan Stuhler
21.Taxing the online haven: Impacts of the EU VAT reform on cross-border e-commerce
Chao Fang, Shuzhong Ma
22.The long run impact of childhood interracial contact on residential segregation
Luca Paolo Merlino, Max Friedrich Steinhardt, Liam Wren-Lewis
23.Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages
Qing Liu, Ruosi Lu, Stephen Teng Sun, Meng Zhang
24.Labor supply effects of a universal cash transfer
Jan Gromadzki
25.Specialised courts and the reporting of intimate partner violence: Evidence from Spain
Jorge García-Hombrados, Marta Martínez-Matute, Carmen Villa
26.Uneven recessions and optimal firm subsidies
Caio Machado
27.Effect of a transfer shock on subnational debt: Micro evidence from Mexico
Mariela Dal Borgo
28.Do second chances pay off? Evidence from a natural experiment with low-achieving students
Aspasia Bizopoulou, Rigissa Megalokonomou, Ştefania Simion
29.Myths of official measurement: Limits to test-based education reforms with weak governance
Abhijeet Singh, Petter Berg
30.Income shocks, political support and voting behaviour
Richard Upward, Peter W. Wright
31.Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior
Zvonimir Bašić, Eugenio Verrina
32.The value of electricity reliability: Evidence from battery adoption
David P. Brown, Lucija Muehlenbachs
33.Targeted regulation for reducing high-ozone events
Christopher Holt, Joshua Linn
摘要
1.Payroll tax incidence: Evidence from unemployment insurance
Audrey Guo
Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer–employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of pass-through to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.
2.Willingness to pay for crime reduction: The role of information in the Americas
Patricio Domínguez, Carlos Scartascini
Crime levels are a perennial development problem in Latin America and a renewed concern in the United States. At the same time, trust in the police has been falling, and questions abound about citizens’ willingness to support government efforts to fight crime. We conduct a survey experiment to elicit willingness to contribute toward reducing crime across five Latin American countries and the United States. We compare homicide, robbery, and theft estimates and find a higher willingness to contribute to more severe crimes and for higher crime reductions. In addition, we examine the role of information on the willingness to contribute by conducting two experiments. While we document an 11 percent gap in willingness to pay for crime reduction between people who under and over-estimate the murder rate, we find that this gap can be wholly eliminated by informing respondents about the actual level of crime. We also show that exposing respondents to crime-related news increases their willingness to pay by 5 percent. On average, our estimates suggest that households are willing to contribute around $152 per year for a 20 percent reduction in homicide, representing an increase in security spending between 15 and 65 percent in Latin American countries (up to 0.5 percent of GDP).
3.How does parental divorce affect children’s long-term outcomes?
Wolfgang Frimmel, Martin Halla, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer
Many papers report a negative association between parental divorce and child outcomes. To provide evidence whether this correlation is causal, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the extent of gender balance in fathers’ workplaces. Fathers who encounter more women in their relevant age–occupation–group at work are more likely to divorce. This result is conditional on the overall proportion of female employees in a firm and on detailed industry affiliation. Parental divorce has persistent, and mostly negative effects on children that differ between boys and girls. Treated boys have lower levels of educational attainment, worse labor market outcomes and are more likely to die early. Treated girls also have lower levels of educational attainment, but they are also more likely to have children at an early age (especially in their teens). However, treated girls lose less in terms of employment. This could be a direct consequence of teenage motherhood, which initiates early entry into the labor market.
4.How fiscally autonomous are local governments? An empirical test
Nicola Mauri
How freely can local jurisdictions change their taxes and spending? I propose an empirical test of the effective degree of municipal fiscal autonomy by studying fiscal adjustments to a permanent exogenous revenue shift. Based on a tax competition model where jurisdictions are partially expenditure constrained, I derive a testable prediction: tax cuts from a small positive revenue shock will be larger (smaller) with higher perceived tax base mobility, if the local policymaker is strongly (weakly) fiscally constrained. I apply this test using a revenue shock generated by a reform in an inter-municipal transfer system within a Swiss canton. tax base mobility is proxied by the availability of zoned land reserves. I find that higher residential land availability is associated with stronger tax rate responses, but I find no statistically significant results for industrial land reserves. In light of the theory, this suggests that the effective degree of fiscal autonomy of local jurisdictions is low. Usual indicators of fiscal decentralization based on public accounts might overestimate the actual autonomy of local governments.
5.Women’s economic empowerment and intimate partner violence
Sanna Bergvall
This study explores the relationship between women’s economic empowerment and intimate partner violence (IPV), measured as women’s hospital visits for assault. Using longitudinal Swedish administrative data, I proxy women’s economic empowerment with a measure of potential relative earnings of married spouses caused by local changes in gender-specific labour demand. The findings reveal that an increase in potential relative earnings increases the probability of women’s hospital visits for injuries caused by assault, and the effect is particularly pronounced for women with low baseline bargaining power. Furthermore, exploiting detailed information on type of hospital visit, diagnosis and medical actions taken at the hospital, I show that the increase in hospital visits for assault is, at least in part, driven by an increase in care-seeking for IPV-related injuries rather than an increase in IPV itself.
6.Intrahousehold inequality and the joint taxation of household earnings
Cassiano B. Alves, Carlos E. da Costa, Felipe Lobel, Humberto Moreira
We derive the optimal joint-income tax schedule for couples, focusing on the distinction between interpersonal and inter-household inequality. Households are composed of two spouses with possibly unequal access to the family’s economic resources. Individual-oriented utilitarianism typically leads to a misalignment between the households’ and the government’s objectives, a phenomenon termed dissonance by Apps and Rees (1988). The traditional ABC formula must be amended by including a Pigouvian term to correct for dissonance. Under general conditions, the effect of dissonance on marginal taxes is ambiguous; its sign depends on whether the less powerful spouse’s marginal contribution to household earnings is less than, or greater than, her marginal entitlement to household consumption. Assuming identical iso-elastic preferences, the multidimensional heterogeneity collapses into a single-dimensional index, preserving the single-crossing property. This simplification enables us to solve (Mirrlees, 1971)’s multidimensional program and quantitatively assess the size and sign of the Pigouvian term, which is positive across all income levels, leading to higher marginal tax rates.
7.The children of HOPE VI demolitions: National evidence on labor market outcomes
John C. Haltiwanger, Mark J. Kutzbach, Giordano Palloni, Henry O. Pollakowski, Matthew Staiger, Daniel H. Weinberg
We combine national administrative data on earnings and participation in subsidized housing to investigate how the demolition of 160 public housing projects—funded by the HOPE VI Demolition program—affected adult labor market outcomes for 18,500 children. Our empirical strategy compares children exposed to the program between ages 10 and 18 to children drawn from thousands of non-demolished projects, adjusting for observable differences using a flexible estimator that combines features of matching and regression. We find that children who resided in HOPE VI projects earn 15 percent more at age 26 relative to children in comparison projects. Earnings gains are greatest for demolitions in high-poverty neighborhoods in large cities, the context for most prior research on HOPE VI. However, most HOPE VI projects were in smaller cities where we find weaker effects that are not statistically significant. We investigate pathways including improved parental earnings, childhood exposure to lower poverty neighborhoods, and greater job accessibility. We find the strongest evidence for improved job accessibility facilitating increased employment and earnings for young adults.
8.Do renewable energy investments create local jobs?
Natalia Fabra, Eduardo Gutiérrez, Aitor Lacuesta, Roberto Ramos
Globally, renewable energy projects often face local opposition despite the potential for job creation. Analyzing data from over 3,900 Spanish municipalities (2017–2021), we find that new jobs frequently do not remain in the host communities. Solar projects show stronger employment and unemployment multipliers compared to wind, reflecting differing task and skill requirements. Beyond the labor market impacts, residents benefit from the investments through greater public spending and increased per capita income. However, these effects are modest, particularly in the case of small to medium-sized plants.
9.The price and employment response of firms to the introduction of minimum wages
Sebastian Link
This paper studies the price and employment responses of firms to the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage in Germany. Widely throughout the economy, affected firms responded by rapidly and frequently increasing prices without cutting employment. These decisions are strongly interrelated: Firms that increased prices relatively more often also showed a less negative employment response. The relative importance of both margins is associated with product market competition and the specific economic situation firms face when being treated. The empirically strong interdependence suggests that the employment effects of minimum wages may not be properly understood when abstracting from other adjustment margins.
10.Listen to her: Gender differences in information diffusion within the household
Dietmar Fehr, Johanna Mollerstrom, Ricardo Perez-Truglia
We study how economic information diffuses within the household, leveraging an information-provision experiment with a representative sample of households from Germany. A random sample of household members received information about their household’s position in the income distribution. When provided with information directly, there are no gender differences in how individuals update their beliefs. However, we observe significant gender disparities in the diffusion of information within the household. Specifically, when only the husband receives the information, it influences the wife’s beliefs; however, when only the wife receives the information, it does not affect the husband’s beliefs.
11.The impact of monitoring on politicians’ attendance: Evidence from the Swiss Upper House
Katharina E. Hofer, Mariana Lopes da Fonseca
In 2014, the Swiss Upper House switched from voting by show of hands to an electronic voting system, where individual decisions on specific exogenously defined vote types are published automatically. We leverage this update in monitoring technology for select votes to identify the impact of monitoring on politicians’ attendance within a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology. Relying on video recordings of all sessions of the 49th Upper House legislature (2011–2015), we determine pre- and post-reform attendance rates during all votes and compare the change in attendance between votes affected and unaffected by the reform. Monitoring has a positive and significant effect on attendance particularly among legislators running for reelection, as compared to those retiring at the end of the term.
12.Paving the road to re-election
Camille Boudot-Reddy, André Butler
The prevailing view in the economic literature is that voters are particularly myopic, encouraging governments to leverage short-term re-election strategies. Under such conditions, public capital investment with long-term rewards – despite its central role in the process of sustained economic development – may be neglected. In the context of India’s rural road construction programme, this study evaluates the role which large-scale public infrastructure initiatives have on the electoral accountability mechanism. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design with newly-digitised village-level voting outcomes from the 2014 general election, the results provide evidence of electoral support attributed to the political alliance which spearheaded the programme. This support is sustained over two electoral cycles, with significant spillover effects in villages within 2 km of a newly built road.
13.The impossible trinity: Competitive markets, free entry, and efficiency
Halvor Mehlum, Gisle J. Natvik, Ragnar Torvik
We present a model in which workers make occupational choices and vote over a tax rate which determines the level of government spending. Workers in occupations whose services are in high (low) demand by the government favor high (low) taxes. We show that the socially efficient size of the public sector cannot be supported in a political economic equilibrium. The reason is that equilibrium tax rates always reward excessive entry into the politically most powerful sector, and thus the equilibrium size of government is always either too big or too small. We show that this is an example of a more general political economy result that extends well beyond the baseline model and holds quite generally: the combination of (i) competitive markets and (ii) free entry is inconsistent with (iii) allocative efficiency.
14.Should I Stay (in School) or Should I Go (to Work)
Lee Tyrrell-Hendry
I explore optimal education subsidies and progressivity of labour taxes in a model with stochastic human capital accumulation and incomplete markets, endogenous labour supply and an education choice modelled as a real option, where agents choose an optimal number of years to study before starting work. In a purely analytical Baseline model with tight borrowing constraints on students, which leads to a no-trade equilibrium without savings, the government pays for education via transfers to students or – equivalently – via grants to universities. The social welfare-maximising policy features generous education subsidies and highly progressive labour taxes, much more so than currently seen in the US or Europe, and results in an average consumption-equivalent gain of 8%. This result is robust to myriad extensions, including a Quantitative model with relaxed financial frictions where students can borrow to finance their education, and where hence the equilibrium features extensive precautionary saving by workers.
15.Race-blind admissions, school segregation, and student outcomes
Jason Cook
In 2007, the Supreme Court declared race-conscious school admissions unconstitutional. This paper provides the first evaluation of a related federal mandate where the Columbus City School District was forced to adopt a race-blind lottery system for its magnet schools. I explore the impact of the dramatic increase in racial segregation resulting from the mandate. More segregated schools spend less per-pupil, enroll lower achieving students, employ lower value-added teachers, and perpetuate “White flight” out of the district. Ultimately, segregation arising from mandated race-blind admissions causes student achievement and college attendance rates to decline.
16.The unintended consequences of merit-based teacher selection: Evidence from a large-scale reform in Colombia
Matias Busso, Sebastián Montaño, Juan Muñoz-Morales, Nolan G. Pope
Teacher quality is a key factor in improving student academic achievement. As such, educational policymakers strive to design systems to hire the most effective teachers. This paper examines the effects of a national policy reform in Colombia that established a merit-based teacher-hiring system intended to enhance teacher quality and improve student learning. Implemented in 2005 for all public schools, the policy ties teacher-hiring decisions to candidates’ performance on an exam evaluating subject-specific knowledge and teaching aptitude. The implementation of the policy led to many experienced contract teachers being replaced by high exam-performing novice teachers. We find that though the policy sharply increased pre-college test scores of teachers, it also decreased the overall stock of teacher experience and led to sharp decreases in students’ exam performance and educational attainment. Using a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the outcomes of students from public and private schools over two decades, we show that the hiring reform decreased students’ performance on high school exit exams by 8 percent of a standard deviation, and reduced the likelihood that students enroll in and graduate from college by more than 10 percent. The results underscore that relying exclusively on specific ex ante measures of teacher quality to screen candidates, particularly at the expense of teacher experience, may unintentionally reduce students’ learning gains.
17.The importance of schools in driving children’s applications for disability benefits
Michael Levere, Jeffrey Hemmeter, David Wittenburg
We explore how schools affect children’s applications to Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools varied in offering virtual or in-person learning during the 2020–21 school year. We use this variation to better understand the way schools, potentially through teacher referrals and informal networks, influence SSI applications. We find that applications were nearly 20 percent lower in counties with virtual learning relative to counties where all learning was in-person. Subgroup analysis suggests that school staff, likely through offering identification and referral services, and informal networks were mechanisms contributing to these differentials.
18.Consumption tax cuts vs stimulus payments
Mehdi Bartal, Yvan Becard
Recent work shows that in macroeconomic models with non-Ricardian consumer behavior, uniform transfers are equivalent to interest rate cuts. That is, policymakers can use stimulus payments to substitute for conventional monetary policy when, say, the zero lower bound on short-term rates binds. We argue that in the same class of models, temporarily reducing consumption taxes delivers more stimulus than transfers — at the same cost to the taxpayer. Consumption tax cuts activate both income and substitution channels and prompt a strong response from all consumers across the wealth distribution. Simulating these policies in a quantitative heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model, we find output expands twice as much.
19.Toward an understanding of tax amnesty take-up: Evidence from a natural field experiment
Patricia Gil, Justin Holz, John A. List, Andrew Simon, Alejandro Zentner
Governments often use partial forgiveness policy to induce debt repayments and increase the disclosure of hidden debts. While ubiquitous, much remains unknown about how well these amnesties work, for whom, and why. We partnered with the Dominican Republic Tax Authority to design a natural field experiment to understand whether, and what types of, nudges can increase amnesty take-up and repayment. Our field experiment, which covers 125,452 taxpayers collectively owing 5.5% of GDP in known debt, tests the impact of messages from the tax authority during an amnesty that highlight deterrence laws, beliefs about future amnesties, and tax morale messages for debt payment and disclosure. Importantly, we find large short-run effects – our most effective treatment increased payments of known debt by 25% and hidden debt by 48% – that are only slightly undone by reductions in subsequent tax payments.
20.The economic consequences of being widowed by war: A life-cycle perspective
Sebastian T. Braun, Jan Stuhler
Despite millions of war widows worldwide, little is known about the economic consequences of being widowed by war. We use life history data from West Germany to show that war widowhood increased women’s employment immediately after World War II but led to lower employment rates later in life. War widows, therefore, carried a double burden of employment and childcare while their children were young but left the workforce when their children reached adulthood. We show that the design of compensation policies likely explains this counterintuitive life-cycle pattern and examine potential spillovers to the next generation.
21.Taxing the online haven: Impacts of the EU VAT reform on cross-border e-commerce
Chao Fang, Shuzhong Ma
To reduce tax losses online, starting from July 2021, the EU mandates value-added tax (VAT) payment for all imported small parcels and requires platforms to collect and remit tax. Using data from China Customs and orders from an AliExpress store, we document that due to the reform, China’s online exports to EU countries dropped by nearly 50% and EU consumers mostly bore the increased tax burden instead of online sellers. Furthermore, there was a decrease in orders previously exempted from VAT and those previously required to pay VAT upon delivery, with the former showing a greater reduction. This study demonstrates that while the EU reform has improved online tax compliance, it has negatively affected consumers to a great extent.
22.The long run impact of childhood interracial contact on residential segregation
Luca Paolo Merlino, Max Friedrich Steinhardt, Liam Wren-Lewis
This paper exploits quasi-random variation in the share of Black students across cohorts within US schools to investigate whether childhood interracial contact impacts the residential choices of Whites when they are adults. We find that, 20 years after exposure, Whites who had more Black peers of the same gender in their grade go on to live in census tracts with more Black residents. Further investigation suggests that this result is unlikely to be driven by economic opportunities or social networks. Instead, the effect on residential choice appears to come from a change in preferences among Whites.
23.Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages
Qing Liu, Ruosi Lu, Stephen Teng Sun, Meng Zhang
We investigate the unintended impact of minimum wage increases on workplace safety. Using establishment-level data from the United States and a cohort-based stacked difference-in-differences design, we find that large increases in minimum wages have significant adverse effects on workplace safety. Our findings indicate that, on average, a large minimum wage increase results in a 4.6 percent increase in the total case rate. Event study estimates show that this adverse effect persists in the medium run. Furthermore, we find a more salient effect for firms more likely to be financially constrained or subject to a higher labor market rigidity in firing workers. We provide suggestive evidence that small minimum wage increases might reduce injury rates, highlighting the potential heterogeneity in the impact of minimum wage changes. We do not find evidence that capital-labor substitution could be behind the findings.
24.Labor supply effects of a universal cash transfer
Jan Gromadzki
I investigate the labor supply effects of the introduction of an exceptionally large unconditional cash benefit. I exploit the unique design of the child benefit program in Poland to identify the effects of the monthly transfer in a difference-in-differences design. The transfer had no short-term effects but caused sizable negative medium-term effects on household labor supply. In the medium run, population estimates indicate that for every extra 100 dollars in monthly child benefit transfers households received, they reduced their after-tax earnings by 25 dollars, spent 32 dollars on consumption, and saved 43 dollars. These negative labor supply effects are much larger and much more precisely estimated among households with low socioeconomic status. Additional evidence shows that the program had a positive impact on investments in human capital and home production efficiency.
25.Specialised courts and the reporting of intimate partner violence: Evidence from Spain
Jorge García-Hombrados, Marta Martínez-Matute, Carmen Villa
This paper assesses the effect of the creation of specialised intimate partner violence (IPV) courts on the reporting of IPV, and the incidence of IPV homicides in Spain. We find that the opening of a specialised IPV court increases the reporting of IPV by nearly 122 offences per 100,000 inhabitants, or 28% in the preferred specification. The rise in reporting is primarily driven by an increase in the reporting of moderate offences. We do not find conclusive evidence on the effects of specialised courts on IPV homicides.
26.Uneven recessions and optimal firm subsidies
Caio Machado
How should policymakers distribute firm subsidies when supply shocks hit some firms and spill over to others through demand externalities? I propose a model to answer that question. The optimal policy depends on the severity of the supply shock and the degree of substitution across goods. If shocks are not too large or widespread, it is optimal to subsidize only firms not hit by supply shocks. For larger and more widespread shocks, the results depend on the elasticity of substitution: If complementarities across the varieties produced by firms are high, firms facing supply shocks should be prioritized, and the opposite is true if complementarities are low.
27.Effect of a transfer shock on subnational debt: Micro evidence from Mexico
Mariela Dal Borgo
This paper examines how a shock to the distribution of federal transfers to Mexican municipalities affects their demand for long-term loans aimed at funding productive investments. Transfers are municipalities’ main source of debt payment and collateral. Using granular supervisory data, I find a positive effect on municipalities’ loan volume, normalized by the country’s total municipal loans, driven by obligations with private lenders. However, I find little or no average effect on take-up — despite many governments being unbanked —, repayment, or volume at the intensive margin. Governments with lower payment capacity and other preexisting debt are more sensitive to the shock. In particular, those with short-term debt are more likely to start borrowing from private lenders, while those with bonds turn to the development bank. The additional revenue mostly funds current rather than capital expenditures. These findings highlight that the policy goal of deepening subnational credit markets in developing countries must also address weaknesses in local investment capacities.
28.Do second chances pay off? Evidence from a natural experiment with low-achieving students
Aspasia Bizopoulou, Rigissa Megalokonomou, Ştefania Simion
In several countries, students who fail high-stakes exams at the end of high school are faced with the choice of retaking or forgoing postsecondary education. We explore exogenous variation generated by a policy that imposed a performance threshold for admission into postsecondary education in Greece to estimate the effect of retaking exams on the exam performance and various measures of the quality of received offers. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and novel administrative data, we find that low-achieving students who retake national exams improve their performance by around 0.6 standard deviation. We also find that they obtain higher quality postsecondary offers, thanks to improved performance and more ambitious re-application choices.
29.Myths of official measurement: Limits to test-based education reforms with weak governance
Abhijeet Singh, Petter Berg
Assessment-led school reforms are a central pillar of policy packages recommended to address low student achievement in developing countries. We use direct audit evidence to assess the truthfulness of official assessments in a reform that has tested over 6 million students annually since 2011 in the large Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Comparing responses to the same test questions by the same students shows a doubling of reported achievement in administrative data versus independent tests. This difference is lower, within schools, in grades with multiple test booklets and external grading. Overall, in contexts with weak governance, interventions relying on test-based accountability appear unlikely to succeed without complementary investments to assure data integrity.
30.Income shocks, political support and voting behaviour
Richard Upward, Peter W. Wright
We provide new evidence on the effects of economic shocks on political support, voting behaviour and political opinions over the last 25 years in the UK. We exploit a sudden, large and long-lasting shock in the form of job loss and trace out its impact on individual political outcomes for up to 10 years after the event. The availability of detailed information on individuals before and after the job loss event allows us to reweight a comparison group to closely mimic the job losers in terms of their observable characteristics, pre-existing political support and voting behaviour. We find consistent and long-lasting effects on support and votes for the incumbent party, and shorter-lived effects on political engagement. We find limited impact on the support for fringe or populist parties. In the context of Brexit, opposition to the EU was much higher amongst those who lost their jobs, but this was largely due to pre-existing differences which were not exacerbated by the job loss event itself.
31.Personal norms — and not only social norms — shape economic behavior
Zvonimir Bašić, Eugenio Verrina
We propose a simple utility framework and design a novel two-part experiment to study the relevance of personal norms across various economic games and settings. We show that personal norms — together with social norms and monetary payoff — are highly predictive of individuals’ behavior. Moreover, they are: (i) distinct from social norms across a series of economic contexts; (ii) robust to an exogenous increase in the salience of social norms; and (iii) complementary to social norms in predicting behavior. Our findings support personal norms as a key driver of economic behavior.
32.The value of electricity reliability: Evidence from battery adoption
David P. Brown, Lucija Muehlenbachs
To avoid electric-infrastructure-induced wildfires, millions of Californians had their power cut for hours to days at a time. We show that rooftop solar-plus-battery-storage systems increased in zip codes with the longest power outages. Rooftop solar panels alone will not help a household avert outages, but a solar-plus-battery-storage system will. Using this fact, we obtain a revealed-preference estimate of the willingness to pay for electricity reliability, the Value of Lost Load, a key parameter for electricity market design. Our estimate, with an average of 4,980/MWh, suggests California’s wildfire-prevention outages resulted in losses from foregone consumption of 406 million to residential electricity consumers.
33.Targeted regulation for reducing high-ozone events
Christopher Holt, Joshua Linn
Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are a precursor to ground-level ozone, a pernicious pollutant that is harmful to human health and ecosystems. Despite decades of regulations and a precipitous decline in NOx emissions, episodic high-ozone events prevent many areas from attaining air quality standards. Theoretically, spatially or temporally differentiated emissions prices could be more cost effective at reducing such events than a uniform price. To test this prediction, with data from EPA and NOAA spanning 2001–2019, we use novel empirical strategies to estimate (1) the link between hourly emissions and high-ozone events and (2) hourly marginal abatement costs. These estimates form the basis for simulations that compare uniform and differentiated emissions pricing. Consistent with economic theory, differentiated pricing is substantially more cost effective at reducing high-ozone events, though this advantage depends on the accuracy of the estimated NOx–ozone relationship. A daytime-only emissions price can achieve the same ozone-event reductions as a uniform emissions price at 42 percent lower cost; an emissions price that varies by power plant and hour of the day can achieve the same reductions at 88 percent lower cost.
