specific experience household structure and intergenerational transfers farm family land and labor arrangements in developing countries data from indian rural household survey was used to test th hypothesis that the coexistence in traditional rural societies of extended intergenerational families infrequent land sales and high reliance on family members as farm laborers is the result of the economic advantages which accrue from the knowledge gained by farming a particular ploy of land over a long period of time the land specific experience of elderly members of a intergenerational household who farmed the land as a child and then as an adult are expecially critical in adverse weather years most previous investigators attributed the existence of multigenerational households the use of family members rather than hired laboreds and the infrequency of land sales to deficiencies in the market i e labor market imperfections and an absence of capital insurance and asset markets in the present investigations these same characteristics are viewed as having an economic advantages a model for estimating the contribution of the experience of the elderly household members to agricultural profits was developed and applied to data from a 3 year panel study of 2900 indian rural farm households the data was collected between 1968 71 by the national council of applied economic research the survey collected information on farm profits farm inputs demographic characteristics and the effects of weather conditions on profits a major limitation of the study was a lack of information on the duration of land ownership age of household members was substituted as a proxy for duration of ownership findings were consistent withe the hypothesis in poor agricultural years gross returns for households which contained an elderly household member were greater than the gross returns for comparable households which did not contain an elderly member the economic advantages of specific knowledge embodied in the experienced elderly farmer were comparable to the economic advantages which accrued to households whose members were more educated the hypothesis cannot fully explain the existence of intergenerational families since there is a relatively large proportion of such families among nonfarm families in many countries including india findings suggest that intergenerational families may provide for more occupational diversity and thereby reduce income risks the specific experience hypothesis has policy implications if technological changes are introduced the value of specific experience may be lost and the frequency of intergenerational households may decline the hypothesis may also explain why farmers are reluctant to agree to land redistribution and consolidation schemes this reluctance may disappear after sufficient technological change has occurred

tax planning of married couples and intra household income inequality abstract this paper examines tax planning of married couples under separate taxation it shows that concerns about the intra household income distribution prevent couples from minimizing tax payments the empirical analysis exploits a specific feature of the german tax system which allows married couples to save taxes by deviating from the default symmetric payroll tax treatment and assigning favorable tax treatment to the primary earner and unfavorable tax treatment to the secondary earner based on a representative random sample of individual tax files we find that a couple is less likely to choose the tax minimizing treatment if tax planning is associated with a larger decline of the net of tax income of the secondary earner this applies regardless of whether the husband or the wife is the main earner however couples where the wife is the main earner are generally more reluctant to assign the more favorable tax treatment to the wife

raising primary school enrolment in developing countries the relative importance of supply and demand abstract few policies are as universally accepted as raising primary school enrolment in developing countries but the policy levers for achieving this goal are not straightforward this paper merges household survey data with detailed school supply characteristics from official sources in order to estimate the relative impact of demand and supply side determinants of rural primary school enrolment in mozambique policy simulations based on a set of plausible interventions show that in rural mozambique building more schools or raising adult literacy will have a larger impact on primary school enrolment rates than interventions that raise household income when relative costs are considered adult literacy campaigns are nearly 10 times more cost effective than the income intervention and 1 5 to 2 5 times better than building more schools

child labor and agricultural shocks this paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and child labor in particular we investigate the extent to which transitory income shocks lead to increases in child labor and whether household asset holdings mitigate the effects of these shocks using data from a household panel survey in tanzania we find that both relationships are significant we investigate mechanisms that could account for these results including buffer stocks and borrowing

a switching regression model for wage determinants in the public and private sectors of a developing country governments in less developed countries face severe budgetary constraints given that public sector employment is a large part of modern sector employment the government wage bill h as come under increased scrutiny the central question is how do gove rnment wages compare with those in the private sector in this paper the authors develop and estimate a model to answer this question an important aspect of this model is the endogenous treatment of sector choice the estimation results full information maximum likelihood sound a strong warning against the use of ordinary least squares est imates that are based on sector specific samples data are from the i vory coast copyright 1988 by mit press

school supply constraints and children s educational outcomes in rural ghana abstract studies of school attainment often fail to acknowledge the possibility that prices for all schooling levels affect the decision to attend any one schooling level in developing countries the assumption that schooling costs are constant throughout the education cycle is manifestly untrue this paper concentrates on the empirical implications of introducing schooling costs that increase with schooling level the results suggest that the cost of advanced levels of education influences decisions at the primary school level the relative magnitude of the cross price elasticities suggests that cross price effects should not be ignored when designing educational user fees

who participates in tax avoidance evidence from swedish microdata abstractthis article empirically examines why not all individuals participate in tax avoidance we use rich swedish administrative panel data on all taxpayers with a link between corporate and individual tax returns and document that few individuals utilize legal and observable tax avoidance opportunities our results show that there are several frictions in tax avoidance participation in addition to monetary benefits from tax avoidance incentives the opportunity to participate in tax avoidance access as well as information and knowledge about these opportunities awareness are important factors for the individual s tax avoidance decision we further show that tax avoidance spreads within communities the impact of the local network is stronger for non commuters who live and work in the same municipality

income shifting within a dual income tax system evidence from the finnish tax reform of 1993 dual income tax systems can suffer from income that shifts from progressively taxed labour income to capital income which is taxed at a lower flat rate this paper empirically examines the 1993 finnish dual income tax reform which radically reduced the marginal tax rates on capital income for some but not all taxpayers we measure how overall taxable income and the relative shares of capital income and labour income reacted to the reform we find that the reform led to a small positive impact on overall taxable income but part of the positive response was probably offset by income shifting among the self employed

how should capital be taxed this survey discusses how capital should be taxed in advanced economies we review the theoretical optimal tax literature survey empirical studies on the distribution of capital and the distortion

the family as an incomplete annuities market families can self insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings they may simply reflect risk sharing behavior of completely selfish family members although family annuity markets are incomplete even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities given adverse selection and transaction costs family risk pooling may be preferred to public market annuities in the absence of public annuities these risk sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for marriage and family formation

borrowing constraints and progress through school evidence from peru this paper investigates the effect of borrowing constraints on the timing of human capital investment in a developing country by looking at how quickly children with different family backgrounds progress through the primary school system in peru the main findings are that children start withdrawing from school earlier as indicated by repetition of grades in households with lower income and durable good holdings and when children are more closely spaced behavior also differs as predicted between children from households that appear to be borrowing constrained and those that appear unconstrained copyright 1994 by mit press

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

education demand and age at school enrollment in tanzania in tanzania actual school enrollment takes place 2 or 3 years later on average than the legal enrollment age in this paper we develop a micro economic model that allows us to disentangle various explanations for such delays we simultaneously estimate enrollment age and schooling duration by maximum likelihood techniques using data from the human resource development survey carried out in tanzania in 1992 93 a particularly interesting result of our econometric analysis is that boys and girls follow fundamentally different patterns of schooling our model suggests that this could be due to different return from pre school training in the family s economic activities or it could be related to the wish to have girls ready to be married as early as possible

an endogenous model of public school expenditures and private school enrollment abstract this paper examines the link between private school enrollment rates and public school expenditures using a panel of new york state school districts models are estimated in which public school spending and private school enrollment rates are endogenously determined the results indicate the presence of endogeneity increases in private school enrollment are not shown to cause decreases in public school per pupil expenditure private school enrollment rates are found to respond to changes in public school expenditure and are sensitive to changes in tuition

resilience and electricity systems a comparative analysis electricity systems have generally evolved based on the natural resources available locally few metrics exist to compare the security of electricity supply of different countries despite the increasing likelihood of potential shocks to the power system like energy price increases and carbon price regulation this paper seeks to calculate a robust measure of national power system resilience by analysing each step in the process of transformation from raw energy to consumed electricity countries with sizeable deposits of mineral resources are used for comparison because of the need for electricity intensive metals processing we find that shifts in electricity intensive industry can be predicted based on countries power system resilience

are changes of organizational form costly income shifting and business entry responses to taxes abstract drawing on administrative panel data covering the full population of business owners in the uk i study the effects of differential tax liabilities across organizational forms on business entry and on income shifting i find that a 10 increase in savings from incorporation leads to a 1 7 increase in the number of new business owners however higher entrepreneurial entry is offset by income shifting increasing the hazard rate of incorporation of the existing self employed by up to 2 3 for a 10 increase in tax savings i show that despite large tax savings from incorporation exceeding 10 pp in some years a substantial proportion of business owners fail to incorporate suggesting that income shifting through incorporation is not the primary avoidance channel for the self employed

who benefits more from higher household consumption the intra household allocation of nutrients in china abstract previous studies find that human capital investments in boys are less income elastic than investments in girls attributing this result to favoritism toward boys i show theoretically that it is plausible for more productive or favored household members to have higher income elasticities i then investigate this question empirically utilizing panel data on individual nutrient intake from the china health and nutrition survey chns to analyze how changes in household per capita nutrient intake affect the intra household allocation of nutrients to deal with potential biases due to omitted variables and simultaneity i use measures of rainfall variation as instruments i find that nutritional intakes are more elastic for males especially prime age men than for females and significantly less elastic for the elderly

the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates a critical review this paper critically surveys the large and growing literature estimating the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates using tax return data first we provide a theoretical framework showing under what assumptions this elasticity can be used as a sufficient statistic for efficiency and optimal tax analysis we discuss what other parameters should be estimated when the elasticity is not a sufficient statistic second we discuss conceptually the key issues that arise in the empirical estimation of the elasticity of taxable income using the example of the 1993 top individual income tax rate increase in the united states to illustrate those issues third we provide a critical discussion of selected empirical analyses of the elasticity of taxable income in light of the theoretical and empirical framework we laid out finally we discuss avenues for future research jel h24 h31 j22

ends against the middle determining public service provision when there are private alternatives abstract public provision of a service coexists with private market provision the quality of public provision is determined by majority vote preferences are not single peaked owing to the presence of private alternatives we identify two cases in one majority voting equilibrium always exists and the median income voter is pivotal in the other a necessary condition for equilibrium indentifies the pivotal voter who must have income below the median when equilibrium exists a coalition of middle income households who consume the public alternative will be opposed by a coalition of rich and poor households with the rich choosing private consumption

income shifting as income creation abstract income shifting arises as one of the key questions when thinking about the design of a tax system as a whole we study a simple economy involving a benevolent policy maker and a population of agents differing in terms of productivities labor supply elasticities and shifting costs paying special attention to the cost structure of income shifting we highlight that when people who shift easily along the extensive margin are also more elastic in labor supply giving them a lower tax rate is a good thing and the government should not necessarily combat income shifting this mechanism may be compared to third degree price discrimination in industrial organization and works as a form of endogenous tagging we explore this possibility numerically before showing that our results derived for a policy maker optimally adjusting two linear tax instruments carry over when two fully non linear taxes are potentially available

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

what does the taxable income elasticity say about dynamic responses to tax changes the taxable income elasticity is relevant to dynamic scoring because it broadly encompasses many ways taxpayers respond to changes in tax rates the elasticity includes for example changes in labor supply and participation savings and portfolio allocation the form of compensation the timing of income and deductions and tax evasion and avoidance on the tax base all subsumed in this one statistic this one statistic summarizes how the tax base expands or contracts in response to changes in tax rates and consequently the extent taxpayer behavior offsets the static revenue loss gain of tax rate reductions increases in contrast to conventional revenues estimates which assume that output and other key macroeconomic aggregates remain fixed when considering changes in the tax law the taxable income elasticity imposes no such constraint nevertheless some macro dynamic responses such as investment and savings related supplyside effects and crowding out are only partially captured in the taxable income elasticity and demand effects are generally not reflected at all also the taxable income elasticity generally does not account for shifting between the individual and corporate tax bases and is primarily useful to only evaluate policies that involve changes in tax rates while large is in the eye of the beholder the taxable income literature has generally found evidence of at least a modest behavioral response with some of the more recent studies suggesting a taxable income elasticity of about 0 4 this paper uses a 0 4 elasticity to simulate the revenue effect of repealing the recent reduction in the top two tax rates to 35 percent and to motivate a discussion of what the this elasticity can tell us about the dynamic response to changes in tax policy

tax distortions to the choice of organizational form income from corporate and noncorporate firms is treated very differently under the tax law in theory given existing tax law the noncorporate sector should consist of very profitable firms owned by low tax bracket investors and firms with tax losses owned by high tax bracket investors but the degree to which firms change their form of organization in response to taxes and the resulting excess burden depends as well on nontax factors given the role of taxes we estimate what size the nontax advantage to incorporating must take in each industry so that the forecasted choices for organizational form aggregated over investors in different tax brackets are consistent with the aggregate evidence while the estimated nontax costs are large in some industries noncorporate activity tends to be concentrated where the costs are small leading to little excess burden from the tax distortion to organizational form

evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs child health and family planning interventions this paper develops and tests an optimizing model determining the distribution of family planning and health subsidies across heterogeneous households and assesses the biases in cross area estimates of the health effects of such subsidies due to public resource optimization the model incorporates both health externalities and the endogenous response of the size of the recipient population to program subsidies longitudinal data describing child health and publicly provided family planning and health programs in 20 barrios in laguna province in the philippines are used to estimate the effects of such programs on child health and the relationships between the distribution of the programs and preprogram health levels the impact of a program on a particular childs health status is viewed as dependent upon the childs length of exposure to the program a basic feature of the model is the presence of health externalities which is shown to be sufficient along with plausible features of household behavior to make selective subsidization of fertility control either alone or in combination with health investment subsidies pareto efficient the model suggests that subsidization of fertility control is likely to be pareto efficient in the presence of health or human capital externalities when human capital and family size are gross substitutes and or when any per child human capital subsidies may substitute for direct subsidies to health investment and an equalizing distribution of the subsidies the highest family planning subsidies to the lowest health recipient households is efficient when both health and family planning subsidies are used fertility control subsidies minimize the subsidy burden for donors and are highest when total subsidy expenditures per child are greatest

the effect of income taxes on household income research on the distribution of income during the 1980s has identified a trend towards increasing inequality which may be the continuation and acceleration of trends spanning several decades this paper explores to what extent behavioral responses to the tax changes during the 1980s may also explain the rising inequality the 1986 tax reform act is used as a natural experiment to explore the roles played by both taxes and a variety of nontax factors our principal finding is that both tax rates and nontax factors appear to have had significant effects on relative income growth during the late 1980s

accountability and yardstick competition in the public provision of education abstract this paper explores the institutional change introduced by the public disclosure of an education development index ideb basic education development index in 2007 to identify the effect of education accountability on yardstick competition in educational spending among brazilian municipalities an exploratory analysis of the data shows a minor reduction 20 in spatial interaction in public educational spending after ideb disclosure compared with the spatial correlation before disclosure of the index our main results explore a discontinuity around the cutoff of 30 students enrolled in the grade under assessment after ideb disclosure the estimates suggest that the spatial autocorrelation and thus yardstick competition is reduced by 52 falsification and robustness tests were performed and suggest that we can claim causality around small bandwidths of the cutoff this finding suggests that the public release of information may decrease the importance of neighbors information on voters decisions

hourly wage rate and taxable labor income responsiveness to changes in marginal tax rates recently a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics however to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate an important component of taxable income reacts to changes in marginal tax rates in this study we use a rich panel data set and a sequence of tax reforms that took place in sweden during the 1980 s to estimate the elasticity of the hourly wage rate with respect to the net of tax rate while carefully accounting for the endogeneity of marginal tax rates as well as other factors that determine wage rates we do find a statistically significant response both among married men and married women the hourly wage rate elasticity with respect to the net of tax rate is estimated to 0 14 0 16 for males and 0 41 0 57 for females in addition we obtain uncompensated taxable labor income elasticities of around 0 21 for men and 0 96 1 44 for women in contrast to earlier studies we also find significant income effects for males accordingly for males the compensated taxable labor income elasticity is about 4 percentage points higher than the uncompensated one

cross base tax elasticity of capital gains abstractthis paper studies the cross base tax elasticity of capital gains realizations to labour income taxes when capital gains are taxed at a separate proportional tax rate using a longitudinal panel of over 265 000 individuals in sweden this paper shows in a regression kink design that labour income taxes affect capital gains realizations in two ways an increase in the marginal labour income tax rate increases the likelihood of realizing capital gains and the amount of realized capital gains one implication of this result is that labour income taxes have a lock out effect but that the magnitude of this effect is smaller than the lock in effect of the actual capital gains tax

an economic analysis of delayed primary school enrollment in a low income country the role of early childhood nutrition this paper investigates why children in low income countries often delay primary school enrollment despite the prediction of human capital theory that schooling will begin at the earliest possible age we explore several explanations for delayed enrollment but focus on the hypothesis that delays are rational responses to early childhood malnutrition we test these alternative hypotheses using recent data from ghana our estimates which address a number of previously ignored econometric issues firmly support the hypothesis that early childhood malnutrition causes delayed enrollment we find little or no support for alternative explanations based on borrowing constraints and the rationing of places in school copyright 1995 by mit press

the demand for primary schooling in madagascar price quality and the choice between public and private providers abstract we estimate a discrete choice model of primary schooling and simulate policy alternatives for rural madagascar among school quality factors the results highlight the negative impacts on schooling demand of poor facility quality and the use of multigrade teaching several grades being taught simultaneously by one teacher in public schools simulations indicate the feasibility of reducing multigrade in public schools by adding teachers and classrooms a policy that would lead to modest improvements in overall enrollments and would disproportionately benefit poor children given much higher price elasticities for poorer households raising school fees to cover some of the additional costs would strongly counteract these favorable distributional outcomes an alternative policy of consolidation of primary schools combined with multigrade reduction or other quality improvements is likely to be ineffective because of the strongly negative impact of distance to school

why governments should invest more to educate girls abstract women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling because these returns decline with more schooling the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men especially in countries where women are much less educated the health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother s education than father s more educated women work more hours in the market labor force broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions these three conditions it is argued justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women s education

the impact of the new wave of financial regulation for european energy markets abstract as the financial and physical markets for energy have increasingly become intertwined energy trade is also covered by financial legislation the european commission wishes to strengthen this financial regulation of energy trade it has put forward a set of regulatory proposals aimed at stabilizing financial markets and limiting volatility of energy prices the most noteworthy are emir mad remit and the revised mifid key elements are transparency new trading venues central clearing obligations and mandatory transaction reporting this article evaluates the likely outcomes for energy markets given the new incentives for market parties it argues that although there is no ground to exempt particular energy market participants such as energy companies from financial legislation increased regulation will not necessarily bring about the effects the commission desires the causal link between derivatives trading and volatility of energy prices is not known precisely and many of the economic effects of the proposed legislation are theoretically and empirically ambiguous moreover potentially conflicting instruments and objectives risk policy inconsistency

business owners and income shifting evidence from finland this study examines income shifting between tax bases among the owners of privately held businesses the dual income tax system in finland offers noticeable incentives for income shifting between wages and dividends for business owners the dividend tax reform of 2005 enables us to study how this particular form of tax avoidance reacts to an exogenous change in tax rates our results support highly active income shifting behavior we find that the income shifting effect is homogeneous across different owners and firms however we find that the size of the tax incentive affects the size of the response suggesting that costs related to income shifting are important

fixing the leak in okun s bucket optimal tax progressivity when avoidance can be controlled this paper examines optimal income tax progressivity when avoidance responses to taxation are important and can be controlled at some cost by the government a simple example shows that ignoring the fact that avoidance can be controlled that the leak in okun s bucket can be fixed can lead to misleading implications about the optimal degree of tax rate progressivity the paper then generalizes the standard modei of the optimal linear income tax to include taxpayer avoidance behavior and the ability of government to control the avoidance but not the labor supply response to higher marginal tax ites the discussion suggests that if the tax burden is to be made more progressive base broadening and increased enforcement ought to be considered as alternatives or complements to increasing tax rates for high income individuals

tax bases tax rates and the elasticity of reported income abstract tax reforms usually change both tax rates and tax bases using a panel of income tax returns spanning the two major u s tax reforms of the 1980s and a number of smaller tax law changes i find that the elasticity of income reported on personal income tax returns depends on the available deductions this highlights that this key behavioral elasticity is not an immutable parameter but rather that it can be to some extent controlled by policy makers one implication is that base broadening reduces the marginal efficiency cost of taxation the results are very similar for all income categories indicating that the rich are more responsive to tax rates because tax rules that apply to them are different their tax base is narrower the point estimates indicate that the tax reform act of 1986 reduced the marginal cost of collecting a dollar of tax revenue with roughly half of this reduction due to the base broadening and the other half due to the tax rate reduction as a by product the analysis in this paper offers a reconciliation of disparate estimates obtained by previous studies of the tax responsiveness of income

the case for a progressive tax from basic research to policy recommendations the fair distribution of the tax burden has long been a central issue in policyhe fair distribution of the tax burden has long been a central issue in policymaking a large academic literature has developed models of optimal tax making a large academic literature has developed models of optimal tax theory to cast light on the problem of optimal tax progressivity in this theory to cast light on the problem of optimal tax progressivity in this paper we explore the path from basic research results in optimal tax theory to paper we explore the path from basic research results in optimal tax theory to formulating policy recommendations formulating policy recommendations models in optimal tax theory typically posit that the tax system should maximize a models in optimal tax theory typically posit that the tax system should maximize a social welfare function subject to a government budget constraint taking into account social welfare function subject to a government budget constraint taking into account that individuals respond to taxes and transfers social welfare is larger when resources that individuals respond to taxes and transfers social welfare is larger when resources are more equally distributed but redistributive taxes and transfers can negatively are more equally distributed but redistributive taxes and transfers can negatively affect incentives to work save and earn income in the fi rst place this creates the clasaffect incentives to work save and earn income in the fi rst place this creates the classical trade off between equity and effi ciency which is at the core of the optimal income sical trade off between equity and effi ciency which is at the core of the optimal income tax problem in general optimal tax analyses maximize social welfare as a function of tax problem in general optimal tax analyses maximize social welfare as a function of individual utilities the sum of utilities in the utilitarian case the marginal weight for individual utilities the sum of utilities in the utilitarian case the marginal weight for a given person in the social welfare function measures the value of an additional dollar a given person in the social welfare function measures the value of an additional dollar of consumption expressed in terms of public funds such welfare weights depend on of consumption expressed in terms of public funds such welfare weights depend on the level of redistribution and are decreasing with income whenever society values the level of redistribution and are decreasing with income whenever society values more equality of income therefore optimal income tax theory is fi rst a normative more equality of income therefore optimal income tax theory is fi rst a normative theory that shows how a social welfare objective combines with constraints arising from theory that shows how a social welfare objective combines with constraints arising from limits on resources and behavioral responses to taxation in order to derive specifi c limits on resources and behavioral responses to taxation in order to derive specifi c

the impact of separate taxation on the intra household allocation of assets evidence from the uk abstract the income tax system in the united kingdom moved from joint to independent taxation of husbands and wives income in 1990 one interesting aspect of independent taxation is the ability for households to choose the division of household assets between the two spouses this tax reform therefore creates an opportunity for households to engage in a form of tax avoidance by shifting their investment income to the spouse with the lower marginal tax rate we use family expenditure survey fes data to examine the impact of this tax reform on the magnitude of investment income shifting between spouses with different marginal tax rates we find a sizeable shift in the share and incidence of asset income claimed by wives who typically have lower marginal tax rates as well as in the incidence of the wife claiming all the household asset income indicating that households responded to this policy change by reallocating asset ownership

dividend taxes and income shifting this paper analyzes whether a dividend tax cut for owner managers of closely held corporations encourages income shifting income generation or both we use rich swedish administrative micro data from 2000 to 2011 comprising detailed firm and individual level information we find robust evidence of extensive income shifting across tax bases in response to the 2006 swedish dividend tax cut owner managers of closely held corporations reclassify earned income as dividend income but do not increase total income the response is more pronounced for owner managers with tax incentives and with easier access to income shifting through a high ownership share

reported gross income and marginal tax rates estimation of the behavioural reactions of spanish taxpayers this article estimates for the spanish personal income tax the elasticity of reported gross income to marginal tax rates the identification of this elasticity has been performed using the reform approved by law 35 2006 which came into force in january 2007 the elasticities obtained suggest the existence of important efficiency costs with significant regional differences the average elasticity estimated for spain as a whole is 0 676 however this elasticity is highly dispersed throughout the spanish administrative regions which indicates the unequal power of distortion of the tax thus households whose principal source of income is salary display an elasticity of 0 337 compared to 0 682 for households whose main income source comes from business or savings lastly a positive correlation is also detected between elasticity and income level an elasticity of 3 6 is reached for taxpayers with an annual gross income exceeding 100 000

does distance matter for institutional delivery in rural india this article estimates the causal effect of distance to health facility on in facility birth in rural india taking into account the endogenous placement of the health facility we find that women living farther away from the health facilities are less likely to give birth at a health facility each additional kilometre from the nearest health facility is associated with a 4 4 decline in the probability of in facility birth policy simulation results indicate that providing access to a health facility within 5 km would increase institutional delivery by 10 overall our findings confirm that distance is an important barrier to in facility births in rural india

energy management under policy and technology uncertainty energy managers in public agencies are subject to multiple and sometimes conflicting policy objectives regarding cost environmental and security concerns associated with alternative energy technologies making infrastructure investment decisions requires balancing different distributions of risks and benefits that are far from clear for example managers at permanent army installations must incorporate congressional legislative objectives executive orders department of defense directives state laws and regulations local restrictions and multiple stakeholder concerns when undertaking new energy initiatives moreover uncertainty with regard to alternative energy technologies is typically much greater than that associated with traditional technologies both because the technologies themselves are continuously evolving and because the intermittent nature of many renewable technologies makes a certain level of uncertainty irreducible this paper describes a novel stochastic multi attribute analytic approach that allows users to explore different priorities or weighting schemes in combination with uncertainties related to technology performance to illustrate the utility of this approach for understanding conflicting policy or stakeholder perspectives prioritizing the need for more information and making investment decisions we apply this approach to an energy technology decision problem representative of a permanent military base

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

a small world methodology of analysis of interchange energy networks the european behaviour in the economical crisis abstract european energy policy pursues the objective of a sustainable competitive and reliable supply of energy in 2007 the european commission adopted a proper energy policy for europe supported by several documents and included an action plan to meet the major energy challenges europe has to face a farsighted diversified yearly mix of energies was suggested to countries aiming at increasing security of supply and efficiency but a wide and systemic view of energy interchanges between states was missing in this paper a small world methodology of analysis of interchange energy networks iens is presented with the aim of providing a useful tool for planning sustainable energy policies a proof case is presented to validate the methodology by considering the european ien behaviour in the period of economical crisis this network is approached as a small world net from a modelling point of view by supposing that connections between states are characterised by a probability value depending on economic political relations between countries

state renewable energy electricity policies an empirical evaluation of effectiveness over the past decade state governments have emerged as us energy policy leaders across the country states are adopting policy instruments aimed at carbon mitigation and renewable energy deployment one of the most prevalent and innovative policy instruments is a renewable portfolio standard rps which seeks to increase the share of renewable energy electrification in the electricity market this analysis evaluates the effectiveness of state energy programs with an empirical investigation of the linkage between state rps policy implementation and the percentage of renewable energy electricity generation across states we use a variant of a standard fixed effects model referred to as a fixed effects vector decomposition with state level data from 1998 to 2006 results indicate that rps implementation is not a significant predictor of the percentage of renewable energy generation out of the total generation mix yet for each additional year that a state has an rps policy they are found to increase the total amount of renewable energy generation these findings reveal a potentially significant shortcoming of rps policies political institutions natural resource endowments deregulation gross state product per capita electricity use per person electricity price and the presence of regional rps policies are also found to be significantly related to renewable energy deployment

public education expenditures and private school enrollment in this paper i investigate whether increases in public education expenditures lead to reductions in private school enrollment in order to deal with the endogeneity of public expenditures i use as a natural experiment the 1998 fundef reform in brazil that caused exogenous variations in local public school funding using data from brazilian school and population censuses i show that public education expenditures increases are associated with reductions in the share of private school enrollment for grade 1 however the effect is smaller for grades 2 to 4 which is consistent with the existence of costs associated with switching schools resume depenses pour l instruction publique et inscriptions dans les ecoles privees dans ce memoire on fait enquete pour etablir si des accroissements dans les depenses pour l instruction publique menent a des reductions dans les inscriptions dans les ecoles privees conscient de l endogeneite des depenses publiques l auteur utilise la reforme fundef de 1998 au brazil qui a entraine des variations exogenes dans le financement des ecoles publiques locales a partir des donnees des recensements bresiliens des ecoles et de la population on montre que les accroissements de depenses pour l instruction publique sont associes a des reductions dans la part des ecoles privees dans les inscriptions en premiere annee cependant l effet est plus faible pour les inscriptions dans les annees 2 a 4 qui suivent ce qui est coherent avec l existence de couts associes aux changements d ecole

the elasticity of taxable income evidence and implications abstract a central tax policy parameter that has recently received much attention but about which there is substantial uncertainty is the overall elasticity of taxable income we provide new estimates of this elasticity which address identification problems with previous work by exploiting a long panel of tax returns to study a series of tax reforms throughout the 1980s this identification strategy also allows us to provide new evidence on both the income effects of tax changes on taxable income and on variation in the elasticity of taxable income by income group we find that the overall elasticity of taxable income is approximately 0 4 the elasticity of real income not including tax preferences is much lower we estimate small income effects of tax changes on reported income implying that the compensated and uncompensated elasticities of taxable income are very similar we estimate that this overall elasticity is primarily due to a very elastic response of taxable income for taxpayers who have incomes above 100 000 per year who have an elasticity of 0 57 while for those with incomes below 100 000 per year the elasticity is less than one third as large moreover high income taxpayers who itemize are particularly responsive to taxation our estimates suggest that optimal tax structures may feature tightly targeted transfers to lower income taxpayers and a flat or even declining marginal rate structure for middle and high income taxpayers

commodity price shocks and child outcomes the 1990 cocoa crisis in cote d ivoire abstract we look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 cote d ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment labor height stature and morbidity using precrisis 1985 88 and postcrisis 1993 data we propose a difference in difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes whereby we compare children of cocoa producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village this causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context we also provide evidence of gender bias against young girls with respect to education and health care we finally argue that the difference in difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints

what policies will reduce gender schooling gaps in developing countries evidence and interpretation summary this paper considers evidence for the effects of policies on gender gaps in education distinguishing between policies that are ostensibly gender neutral and those that explicitly target girls the demand for girls schooling is often more responsive than boys to gender neutral changes in school distance price and quality patterns which can be explained in a human capital investment model through assumptions about girls and boys schooling costs and returns among policies that target girls enrollments price incentives to households or schools and the provision of female teachers appear to be effective other interventions hold promise but have not been the subject of rigorous evaluation pointing to an important agenda for future research