130,761 research outputs found
Public Spending and Taxation with Non-cooperative Families
No full textWe develop a political economy model of income taxation and public spending, in which we pay special attention to the composition of the latter. The significant economic unit is taken to be the household. Each household is made of two agents, positively sorted by wage, who engage in the non-cooperative home production of a household public good. This leads to an inefficient laissez-faire equilibrium. We consider three policy instruments, a tax rate on labour income, and two types of transfer to the household (cash versus in-kind). The in-kind transfer is one of the inputs in the home production process. Since the pre-intervention equilibrium is inefficient, there is a general consensus among the agents that some corrective taxation is needed; however, those at bottom of the income distribution, who prefer a redistributive (as opposed to corrective) policy, favour a combination of high taxes and cash transfers, while those at the top would rather have low taxes and in-kind provision. Assuming, as seems plausible according to the empirical evidence, that political participation and income are positively correlated, we find that the decisive agent, i.e. the one whose preferred policy wins at the political equilibrium, has income above the mean. (JEL codes: D13, D72, H31) Copyright The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected], Oxford University Press.
The political economy of post-compulsory education policy with endogenous credit constraints
No full textAltruistic parents, who differ in income, make financial transfers to their children, who differ in ability. The children invest in post-compulsory education, subject to an endogenous credit constraint, and taking policy as given. There are two policy tools: a subsidy to those who participate in education and a proportional income tax. Not all children participate; a larger subsidy encourages participation, and a larger income tax discourages it. The parents, prior to making transfers, vote on policy. A voting equilibrium, if it exists, is such that voters in the two tails of the income distribution support a reduction, while the middle-class supports an expansion, of the education subsidy. Public support of education is a policy with regressive elements as it entails, among other things, a redistribution from the poor to the middle-earners. We characterise a local equilibrium analytically, verify its existence numerically, and finally perform a number of comparative statics exercises
Household Production and the Design of the Tax Structure
No full textThis paper amalgamates two topical issues in the economics of commodity taxation: the general case for non-uniformity, and the tax treatment of commodities that are either inputs to household production or close substitutes for household produced goods. Assuming a redistributive objective and that the government can implement a non-linear income tax system and linear commodity taxes we investigate if the existence of household production generates a natural case for non-uniform commodity taxation. Four main results are reported. First, when the set of commodities is partitioned into consumption goods and input goods, and commodity taxes are restricted to being within-group uniform, the composite commodity theorem can be used to characterize the optimal commodity taxes. Secondly, sufficient conditions for within-group uniform commodity taxes to be fully optimal are derived. Thirdly, we argue that an input good should be taxed at a higher rate than general consumption if and only if the degree of complementarity in household production (between the input good and a time-input) is larger than the degree of complementarity in consumption (between general consumption and the household produced good). Finally, we show that under simple normality, a market substitute for the household-produced good should be taxed at a lower rate than general consumption. The intuition for the last two results is that the suggested pattern of taxation discourages "do-it-yourself" behaviour, which relaxes the self-selection problem.</p
Non-cooperative households and the size and composition of public expenditure
No full textThis paper presents a model in which the composition and size of public spending are determined through a political process. Agents differ in wage rates, and live in households positively sorted by wage; household production benefits both partners but the partners interact noncooperatively, hence the laissez-faire equilibrium is inefficient. There are three policy tools, a labour income tax rate, a cash transfer and an in-kind transfer. The latter can be combined with household production to generate a household public good. All agents agree on some form of public intervention to remedy the inefficiency, but low-wagers prefer high taxes and cash transfers, while high-wagers prefer low taxes and in-kind provision. Under the empirically plausible assumption that voting participation is positively correlated with income, the equilibrium policy will be of the sort preferred by voters with above-mean income. This effect is accentuated by increased inequality
Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence and Children Dynamic Skill Accumulation: Evidence from a UK Longitudinal Study
No full textChildren are increasingly recognized as secondary victims of intimate partner violence. This
paper uses a unique UK longitudinal child development survey to study the relationship
between verbal and physical abuse experienced by mothers and children’s development up to
the age of seven. Estimating production functions for cognitive, social, and socio-emotional
skills we find that exposure during pre-school years has a quantitatively important negative
effect on socio-emotional skills among toddlers and negatively affects cognitive and social
skills after age three. The estimated impact on cognitive development is consistent with
measures of cognitive skills based on school-based tests
Time, self-selection and user charges for public goods
No full textMany public goods generate utility only when combined with a time-input. Important examples include road networks and publicly provided leisure facilities. If it is possible to charge for the time spent using the public good it is generally a second-best Pareto optimal policy to do so even in the absence of congestion. An optimal linear user charge is analysed within a standard optimum income-tax framework. Second-best public good provision in the presence of a user charge is also characterized and factors that influence the direction of optimal distortion of the public good supply are identified
Search and Taxation in a Model of Underground Economic Activities
No full textWe develop a simple model oj an economy uwith underground production and trade. Because of the furtive naiture of underground activities, information about tradling opportunities in the irregular secbor is less than perfect--hence, agents devote some time to locate trading partners in the black economy and theni bargain over the termns of trade.:The model stresses how individual involvement in underground economnic activities is related to earnings capacitY. It also highlights how taxes and tax enjoreement are natural policy complements. Both results are argued to be useful when interpreting micro- and aggregate-level data on underground econornic activities. (JFL H26, H121, D72, D83) 1
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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