American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2023年第2期

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2023年第2期

Vol. 15 No. 2 May 2023

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How Do Institutions of Higher Education Affect Local Invention? Evidence from the Establishment of US Colleges

高等教育机构如何影响地方发明?美国大学的建立就是证据

DavidCard, David Silver

Treatment practices vary widely across hospitals, often with little connection to patients' medical needs. We assess impacts of these differences in delivery practices at childbirth. We find that infants quasi-randomly delivered at hospitals with higher C-section rates are born in better shape and are less likely to be readmitted, with suggestive evidence of improved survival. These benefits are driven by avoidance of prolonged labors that pose risks to infant health. In contrast, these infants are more likely to visit the emergency department for respiratory-related problems, consistent with a large observational literature linking C-section to chronic reductions in respiratory health.

Optimal Income Taxation with Spillovers from Employer Learning

具有雇主学习溢出效应的最优所得税

<span ashley="" '="" style="box-sizing: border-box;text-rendering: optimizelegibility;text-size-adjust: none" id="hcard-">Ashley C.Craig

I study optimal income taxation when human capital investment is imperfectly observable by employers. In the model, Bayesian inference about worker productivity compresses the wage distribution, lowering the private return to human capital investment. An externality arises: given the same information, employers are more optimistic about each individual if workers are generally more productive. The significance of this externality hinges on the accuracy of employers' beliefs and the responsiveness of human capital. For the United States, taking it into account lowers optimal marginal tax rates for most workers, reducing them by a maximum of 9–13 percentage points between $50,000 and $100,000.

本文研究了雇主在人力资本投资不完全可观察的情况下的最优所得税。在模型中，关于工人生产率的贝叶斯推断压缩了工资分配，降低了私人人力资本投资的回报。这就产生了外部性:在相同的信息下，如果员工总体上更有生产力，雇主对每个人都更乐观。这种外部性的重要性取决于雇主信念的准确性和人力资本的反应能力。对美国来说，将其考虑在内会降低大多数工人的最佳边际税率，将5万美元至10万美元之间的税率最多降低9-13个百分点。

Pensions and Fertility: Microeconomic Evidence

养老金和生育率:微观经济证据

LennardZyska

This study identifies the causal effect of pension generosity on women's fertility behavior. It capitalizes on Brazil's expansion of the pension system to rural workers, whose pension wealth subsequently more than tripled. Difference-in-difference, instrumental variable, and event study methods show that the pension reform reduces the propensity of childbearing of women of fertile age by 8 percent in the short run. Completed fertility declines by 1.3 children within 20 years after the reform, reducing the contribution base of the pay-as-you-go pension system in the long run. The fertility response is strongest at higher birth parities, among older women, and among mothers with sons.

Profiting from Most-Favored-Customer Procurement Rules: Evidence from Medicaid

从最优惠客户采购规则中获利:来自医疗补助的证据

ThomasHwang and <span '="" style="box-sizing: border-box;text-rendering: optimizelegibility;text-size-adjust: none" id="hcard-">Luca Maini

Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that an increase to Medicaid's minimum drug rebate under the Affordable Care Act in 2010 lowered non-Medicaid drug spending by 2.5 percent. A stylized bargaining model shows that this is likely driven by the interaction of this reform with Medicaid's "most-favored customer" clause (MFCC). By examining the response of drugs that faced a change in incentives equivalent to the removal of Medicaid's MFCC, we estimate that removing the Medicaid MFCC would have reduced overall 2010 non-Medicaid drug spending by an additional 3.5 percent, though it would have likely also increased Medicaid spending.

No Spending without Representation: School Boards and the Racial Gap in Education Finance

AndreasGulyas, Sourav Sinha

We study the 2011 Austrian pay transparency law, which requires firms above a size threshold to publish internal reports on the gender pay gap. Using an event-study design, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus leaving the gender wage gap unchanged. The effects are precisely estimated, and we rule out that the policy narrowed the gender wage gap by more than 0.4 p.p.. Moreover, we do not find evidence for wage compression within establishments. We discuss several possible reasons why the reform did not reduce the gender wage gap.

Peer Effects in Police Use of Force

警察使用武力中的同伴效应

Roman G.Rivera and Akshaya Jha and <span frank="" '="" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;text-size-adjust: none" id="hcard-">Frank A. Wolak

Forward markets are believed to aggregate information about future spot prices and reduce the cost of producing the commodity. We develop a measure of the extent to which forward and spot prices agree in markets with transaction costs. Using this measure, we show that day-ahead prices better reflect real-time prices at all locations in California's electricity market after the introduction of financial trading. We then present evidence suggesting that operating costs and input fuel use fell after the introduction of financial trading on days when the nonconvexities inherent to the production and transmission of electricity are especially relevant.

Borrowing Costs after Sovereign Debt Relief

主权债务减免后的借款成本

DavidMihalyi and Cher Hsuehhsiang Li and Maggie Liu, Vis Taraz

How do rising temperatures affect long-term labor reallocation in developing economies? In this paper we examine how increases in temperature impact structural transformation and urbanization within Indian districts between 1951 and 2011. We find that rising temperatures are associated with lower shares of workers in nonagricultural sectors, with effects intensifying over a longer time frame. Supporting evidence suggests that local demand effects play an important role: declining agricultural productivity under higher temperatures reduces the demand for nonagricultural goods and services, which subsequently lowers nonagricultural labor demand. Our results illustrate that rising temperatures limit sectoral and rural-urban mobility for isolated households.

Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy

对亿万富翁征税:遗产税和超级富豪的地理位置

Daniel J.Wilson

We contribute to the literature on the effect of taxes on the locational choices of wealthy individuals by examining the geographical sensitivity of the Forbes 400 richest Americans to state estate taxes. Though we find billionaires' effective tax rates are only about half the statutory rate, their residential choices are highly sensitive to these taxes, as 35 percent of local billionaires leave states with an estate tax. This tax-induced mobility causes a large reduction in the aggregate tax base. Nonetheless, we find that the revenue benefit of an estate tax exceeds the cost for the vast majority of states.

通过考察福布斯400名最富有的美国人对州遗产税的地理敏感性，我们对税收对富人地域选择的影响的文献做出了贡献。尽管我们发现亿万富翁的实际税率只有法定税率的一半左右，但他们的居住选择对这些税收非常敏感，因为35%的当地亿万富翁在离开州时要缴纳遗产税。这种税收诱导的流动性导致了总税基的大幅下降。尽管如此，我们发现，对绝大多数州来说，遗产税带来的收入收益超过了成本。

Go with the Politician

随波逐流

ChunyangWang

Chinese local leaders are frequently moved across prefectures. By combining local leader rotation data and comprehensive firm land parcel purchase data across prefectures from 2006 to 2016, this paper examines how firm-politician connections affect resource allocation and finds that a firm headquartered in a leader's previous work prefecture purchases three times more land parcels in that leader's new governing prefecture than the prefecture-year mean, at half the unit prices. Identification is from within-firm-year variation in various prefectures through exogenous politician rotation. Land usage efficiency is lower for these follower firms' land parcels. Land allocation distortion is also economically sizable.

中国的地方领导人经常被调任到其他地方。本文结合2006—2016年地方领导轮岗数据和地级市企业地块综合购买数据，考察了企业—政治家关系对资源配置的影响。通过外生政治家轮换，识别来自于各地级市企业—年度内的变化。这些跟随企业地块的土地利用效率较低。土地分配扭曲在经济上也是相当大的。

Externalities in International Tax Enforcement: Theory and Evidence

LudvigWier and Aleksandar Zaklan

I examine the Coasean independence property in a large multinational cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, the EU Emissions Trading System. I analyze whether emissions of power producers are independent from allowance allocations by leveraging a change in allocation policy for a difference-in-difference strategy. The evidence suggests that the independence property holds overall and for larger emitters and that firms respond to the loss in allocation by increasing allowance purchases. Suggestive evidence for small emitters indicates that trading costs or behavioral bias distorts their emission decisions. However, their small emission share leaves the independence property intact at the sector level.

我考察了一个大型跨国温室气体排放限额与交易体系——欧盟排放交易体系——中的Coasean独立性。我利用双重差分策略改变分配政策，分析发电企业的排放是否独立于配额分配。证据表明，独立属性对整体和较大的排放主体都有效，企业通过增加配额购买来应对配额分配的损失。对小型排放企业的暗示性证据表明，交易成本或行为偏差扭曲了它们的排放决策。然而，它们的排放份额很小，在部门层面上保持了独立性。