Journal of Public Economics 2023年第4期

Journal of Public Economics 2023年第4期

 

 

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Affirmative action and its race-neutral alternatives

平权法案及其种族中立的替代方案

Zachary Bleemer

As affirmative action loses political feasibility, many universities have implemented race-neutral alternatives like top percent policies and holistic review to increase enrollment among disadvantaged students. I study these policies’ application, admission, and enrollment effects using University of California administrative data. UC’s affirmative action and top percent policies increased underrepresented minority (URM) enrollment by over 20 percent and less than 4 percent, respectively. Holistic review increases implementing campuses’ URM enrollment by about 7 percent. Top percent policies and holistic review have negligible effects on lower-income enrollment, while race-based affirmative action modestly increased enrollment among very low-income students. These findings highlight that the most common race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action increase Black and Hispanic enrollment far less than affirmative action itself and reveal that none of these policies substantially affect universities’ socioeconomic composition.

 

 

Partisan political beliefs and social learning

党派政治信仰和社会学习

Andrea Robbett, Lily Colón, Peter Hans Matthews

American politics is currently characterized by polarized beliefs about otherwise verifiable realities, a pathology often ascribed to the influence of “echo chambers” on like-minded partisans. Partisans may seek out the views of like-minded individuals for either instrumental reasons, that is, because co-partisans are presumed to know more, or for expressive reasons, to learn or confirm “partisan congenial” beliefs. We conduct an online experiment to characterize the demand for, and use of, social information about political beliefs. We find that participants are responsive to the cues of both co-partisans and mixed partisan groups, but are less disposed to consult opposing partisans or to follow their beliefs. However, when a reliable source of outside information becomes available, participants are much less likely to seek social information of any kind, consistent with an instrumental rather than expressive motive. In short, there is mistrust across partisan lines but also a willingness to consult social information in pursuit of “correct beliefs.” The further observation that those who do consult peers are not correct more often underscores the importance of reliable private information as a bulwark against some of the pernicious effects of echo chambers.

 

 

Optimal income taxation in unionized labor markets

工会化劳动力市场的最优所得税

Albert Jan Hummel, Bas Jacobs

This paper extends the Diamond (1980) model with labor unions to study optimal income taxation and to analyze whether unions can be desirable for income redistribution if income taxes are optimized. Unions bargain with firms over wages in each sector and firms unilaterally determine employment. Optimal unemployment benefits and optimal income taxes are lower in unionized labor markets. Unions raise the efficiency costs of income redistribution, because unemployment benefits and income taxes raise wage demands, and thereby generate involuntary unemployment. We show that unions are socially desirable only if they represent (low-income) workers whose participation is subsidized on a net basis. By creating implicit taxes on work, unions alleviate the labor-market distortions caused by income taxation. We empirically verify whether (i) participation tax rates are lower if unions are more powerful, and (ii) unions are desirable by compiling our own data set with union densities and participation tax rates for 18 sectors in 23 advanced countries. In line with our theoretical predictions, we find that participation tax rates are lower if unions are stronger. Moreover, the desirability condition for unions is never met empirically. Numerical simulations for the Netherlands confirm that unions are not desirable if income taxes are optimized and optimal participation taxes are lower if unions are stronger.

 

 

Children’s patience and school-track choices several years later: Linking experimental and field data

几年后，孩子们的耐心和学校轨道选择:将实验数据和实地数据联系起来

Silvia Angerer, Jana Bolvashenkova, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler, Philipp Lergetporer, Matthias Sutter

We present direct evidence on the link between children’s patience and educational-track choices years later. Combining an incentivized patience measure of 493 primary-school children with their high-school track choices taken at least three years later at the end of middle school, we find that patience significantly predicts choosing an academic track. This relationship remains robust after controlling for a rich set of covariates, such as family background, school-class fixed effects, risk preferences, and cognitive abilities, and is not driven by sample attrition. Accounting for middle-school GPA as a potential mediating factor suggests a direct link between patience and educational-track choice.

 

 

“Model minorities” in the classroom? Positive evaluation bias towards Asian students and its consequences

“模范少数民族”在教室里?对亚洲学生的积极评价偏向及其后果

Ying Shi, Maria Zhu

The fast-growing demographic group of Asian Americans is often perceived as a “model minority.” This paper establishes empirical evidence of this stereotype in the context of education and then analyzes its consequences. We show that teachers rate Asian students’ academic skills more favorably than observationally similar White students in the same class, even after accounting for test performance and behavior. This contrasts with teachers’ lower likelihood of favoring Black and Hispanic students. Notably, teachers respond to the presence of any Asian student in the classroom by widening Black-White and Hispanic-White assessment gaps. This suggests that the “model minority” stereotype can negatively impact other minority groups despite its ostensibly positive connotation.

 

 

Intergenerational spillover effects of language training for refugees

难民语言培训的代际溢出效应

Mette Foged, Linea Hasager, Giovanni Peri, Jacob Nielsen Arendt, Iben Bolvig

Children of refugees are among the most economically disadvantaged youth in several European countries. They are more likely to drop out of school and to commit crime. We find that a reform in Denmark in 1999 that expanded language training for adult refugees and was shown to improve their earnings and job market outcomes permanently, also increased lower secondary school completion rates and decreased juvenile crime rates for their children. The crime effect is entirely due to boys who were below school age when their parents received language training. The older cohorts who were in elementary school when their parents received language training performed better in lower secondary school. Boys were more likely to finish lower secondary school and to sit the final exams, and girls achieved higher grade point averages in the exams.

 

 

The political consequences of resource scarcity: Targeted spending in a water-stressed democracy

资源稀缺的政治后果:在一个水资源紧张的民主国家，有针对性的支出

Meera Mahadevan, Ajay Shenoy

We study whether resource scarcity enhances the scope for targeted spending in India. Farmers without access to groundwater during dry seasons cope using a large public-aid program controlled by local politicians. We leverage a multidimensional regression discontinuity for exogenous variation in whether local politicians are aligned with the state’s ruling party. We find that the state government channels disproportionate funds to politically-aligned jurisdictions in water-stressed areas and gains votes in subsequent elections. However, we find no partisan differences in aid allocation for non-water-stressed areas, suggesting a selective targeting of public funds to garner votes in the highest-return regions.

 

 

Income tax credits for consumer services: A tool for tackling VAT evasion?

为消费者服务提供所得税抵免:解决逃税问题的工具?

Thiess Buettner, Boryana Madzharova, Orlando Zaddach

This paper analyzes the effects of an income tax credit for hard-to-tax consumer services on evasion of the value-added-tax (VAT). Based on the individual tax files of the universe of VAT payers in Germany, our analysis shows that harnessing incentives for consumers through tax credits fosters firms’ compliance with VAT by bringing in an element of third-party reporting at the last VAT stage. Our results point at strong stimulating effects of the introduction of the tax credit on reported sales as well as on the ratio of reported sales to inputs and we find limited price effects. While two thirds of the revenue losses in the income tax are recovered by an increase in VAT revenues, at least a quarter and up to a half of the revenue gain is associated with a response at the VAT evasion margin. The policy thus fosters considerable formalization effects.

 

 

Climate adaptation policies and infant health: Evidence from a water policy in Brazil

气候适应政策与婴儿健康:来自巴西水政策的证据

Daniel Da Mata, Lucas Emanuel, Vitor Pereira, Breno Sampaio

This paper studies how in utero exposure to a large-scale climate adaptation program affects birth outcomes. The program built around one million cisterns in Brazil’s poorest and driest region to promote small-scale decentralized rainfall harvesting. Access to cisterns during early pregnancy increased birth weight, particularly for more educated mothers. Data suggest that more educated women complied more with the program’s water disinfection training, highlighting that even simple, low-cost technologies require final users’ compliance (“the last mile”) to be effective. In the context of growing water scarcity, adaptation policies can foster neonatal health and thus have positive long-run implications.

 

 

Does candidates’ media exposure affect vote shares? Evidence from Pope breaking news

候选人的媒体曝光是否会影响选票份额?来自Pope突发新闻的证据

Giulia Caprini

I study the impact of politicians’ media exposure in campaign on their vote share, exploiting an exogenous change in coverage during the Italian 2013 electoral race. Right before the election, the Pope Benedict XVI suddenly resigned and broadcast coverage of politics markedly dropped. Only five days of lower visibility of the right-wing leader and TV tycoon Berlusconi (-26 percentage points) caused a 2 percentage points dip in his vote share, and lead to his defeat by 0.4 percentage points. Following the TV coverage disruption, a part of Berlusconi’s electorate resorted to Internet for political news, and later favored a new party with Internet-centred propaganda.

 

 

Competence-loyalty tradeoff under dominant minority rule: The case of Manchu rule, 1650-1911

占主导地位的少数民族统治下的能力与忠诚的权衡:1650-1911年满清统治案例

Shuo Chen, Xinyu Fan, L. Colin Xu, Xun Yan

This paper examines how a million Manchus, as a dominant minority, partly relied on a cross-ethnic personnel strategy to rule over 100 million Han Chinese for 267 years. Under this strategy, Han elites were appointed to handle daily administrative issues, on top of whom Manchu superiors were assigned for oversight. We find that more frequent local extreme weather – a proxy for governance complexity – led to higher likelihood of such cross-ethnic arrangements. This link is stronger in regions where Han elites accumulated more discretionary power. Moreover, the cross-ethnic strategy was associated with better local economic development, more efficient policy execution, and enhanced recognition of imperial authority.

 

 

 

Can beneficiary information improve hospital accountability? Experimental evidence from a public health insurance scheme in India

受益信息能否改善医院的问责制?来自印度公共健康保险计划的实验证据

Pascaline Dupas, Radhika Jain

We study the role of hospital compliance in the effectiveness of government health insurance in India. Using patient surveys, we document that participating hospitals charge unauthorized fees to poor patients eligible to receive free care. Average out-of-pocket payments (OOPP) for chronic kidney care patients are $43 per month, or 25% annual GDP per capita, and are high at both public and private hospitals. Awareness of program benefits is low despite patients having used insurance for several months. We conduct a randomized experiment to test whether phone-based information about program benefits can enable insurance beneficiaries to hold hospitals accountable and lower OOPP. The intervention effectively increases program awareness by 0.17 standard deviations but has no effect on OOPP overall. However, effects differ dramatically by hospital sector: patients at private hospital see no change in OOPP despite increased bargaining and search; monthly OOPP among patients visiting public hospitals, who are poorer and lower caste, drop by $12 (35%), because they are able to negotiate to get more of their benefits at the hospital instead of paying for them off-site. The findings suggest that patient-driven accountability can meaningfully improve public service delivery, even in the context of specialized tertiary care, but may not substitute for top-down monitoring of private agents.

 

 

Progressive consumption taxes

累进消费税

Carlos E. da Costa, Marcelo R. Santos

Whether consumption or labor income is progressively taxed is irrelevant to household choices and welfare in a static setting. Add dynamics to the problem and these two forms of progressivity have markedly different implications for how earnings vary along the life cycle: in a stylized life-cycle model, the progressive income tax reduces Frisch elasticities of labor supply whereas the progressive consumption tax reduces the elasticity of inter-temporal substitution. We explore the consequences of replacing the current U.S. tax system with one in which labor income taxes are linear and consumption taxes are progressive. We find welfare gains that exceed 10% in consumption equivalent variation terms in steady-state comparisons. An indirect consequence of the more variable earnings profile, greater asset accumulation, is found to be a very if not the most important quantitative aspect of progressive consumption taxes. Also important, when compared to labor income taxes, progressive consumption taxes are more positively correlated with inherited wealth. We take this aspect into account by considering a non–homothetic warm-glow motive that approximates the empirical distribution of wealth. We discuss several issues related to implementation and find that approximately half of the welfare gains are attained by using the information gathered by social security to implement income averaging in the sense of Vickrey (1947).