Books and Journals
Sources in this library
Category
- Business Law (1110)
- Public and Administrative Law (1110)
- Tax Law (1110)
- Civil Law (78)
- Labor Law and Social Security (78)
Publisher
- Wiley (1110)
- Littler Mendelson (78)
Latest documents
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Transnational crimes: how nations should cooperate and why they don't*
Chain‐form crime partnerships and intelligence sharing by national authorities to detect cross‐border partners create multiple externalities in the combat against transnational crimes and illicit trafficking. Cooperative enforcements that minimize global harms prioritize the country with lower intelligence production and/or superior detection capability. In equilibrium, as in practice, national enforcements are underbudgeted and might prioritize the wrong side – predominantly the high‐budget, high‐harm country. Governments might not share intelligence out of fear of importing enforcement burden, and harmonizing criminal sanctions alone might not be effective. Shocks on crime deterrence in a target country are first absorbed by source countries, implying weaker horizontal crime transfer effects than projected.
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The effect of compulsory face mask policies on community mobility in Germany*
There is an ongoing debate about face masks being made compulsory in public spaces to contain COVID‐19. A key concern is that such policies could undermine efforts to maintain social distancing and reduce mobility. We provide first evidence on the impact of compulsory face mask policies on community mobility. We exploit the staggered implementation of policies by German states during the first wave of the pandemic and measure mobility using geo‐located smartphone data. We find that compulsory face mask policies led to a short‐term reduction in community mobility, with no significant medium‐term effects. We can rule out even small increases in mobility.
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The roots of inequality: estimating inequality of opportunity from regression trees and forests*
We propose the use of machine learning methods to estimate inequality of opportunity and to illustrate that regression trees and forests represent a substantial improvement over existing approaches: they reduce the risk of ad hoc model selection and trade off upward and downward bias in inequality of opportunity estimates. The advantages of regression trees and forests are illustrated by an empirical application for a cross‐section of 31 European countries. We show that arbitrary model selection might lead to significant biases in inequality of opportunity estimates relative to our preferred method. These biases are reflected in both point estimates and country rankings.
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Unfair inequality and growth*
Fighting against economic inequality is one fundamental social goal in the agendas of most governments. However, recent studies highlight that people actually prefer unequal societies, as they accept inequality generated by an individual's effort and wish to reduce only unfair inequality (generated by factors beyond an individual's control). This distinction might help to explain the fundamental unsolved question about whether inequality is good or bad for growth: unfair inequality (UI) could be growth‐deterring, while fair inequality (FI) might be growth‐enhancing. We derive a reduced‐form growth equation from a stylized overlapping‐generations model with human capital that includes FI, UI, and poverty. Then, using an instrumental variable approach, we show for alternative samples and inequality measures at the worldwide level that the estimated coefficient associated with UI is always negative, while the coefficient of total inequality increases when UI is included in the regression. Moreover, we find that poverty mediates this relationship because the higher the poverty rate, the smaller the impact of either type of inequality on growth.
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Do tax subsidies for retirement saving affect total private saving? New evidence on middle‐income workers*
We exploit exogenous variation from a pension reform in Denmark to estimate the effect of tax subsidies on total private saving. We present new evidence on individuals in the middle of the income distribution and show that a reduction in tax subsidies for retirement saving reduces total private saving. The reform changed the tax incentives for saving in the pension scheme that holds the highest tax advantage for middle‐income workers in Denmark. We find that for each unit of reduced saving in this pension scheme, only 64 percent is substituted to other types of saving.
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Experienced versus decision utility: large‐scale comparison for income–leisure preferences*
Subjective well‐being (SWB) data are increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as “experienced utility”, it has recently been compared to “decision utility” using small‐scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non‐experimental and large‐scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income–leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a “deviation” measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB‐maximizing hours. We show that about three‐quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain more than half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB‐maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions.
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Hours risk and wage risk: repercussions over the life cycle*
We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life‐cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain 31 percent of total risk, permanent hours shocks 21 percent. Progressive taxation attenuates cross‐sectional earnings risk, but its life‐cycle insurance impact is much smaller. At the mean, a one‐standard‐deviation hours shock raises lifetime income by 11 percent, a wage shock by 13 percent.
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Penalty lottery*
To control sequential public bad productions under imperfect monitoring, this paper proposes a penalty lottery: a violator passes the responsibility of the fine to the next potential violator with some probability and pays all the accumulated fines with the complementary probability. The penalty lottery does not merely impose extreme fines because an absorbing state is practically unreachable. It self‐selects people more willing to produce public bads and endogenously imposes the larger expected fines on them. It has advantages over the day‐fine system in which the fine depends on the offender's daily income. Experimental evidence is consistent with the proposed theoretical predictions.