Essays in public economics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Transfer programs based on income often generate non-convex kinks in budget sets, particularly in their phase-out regions. In such settings, optimizing agents may respond to changes in the schedule by "jumping" from one bracket of a tax and transfer schedule to another, a behavior that is ruled out by the widely used "first-order" approach in optimal tax theory. This paper presents evidence that such jumps are empirically important using administrative data on reported income that spans a reform of the Brazilian anti-poverty program Bolsa Familia. I develop a theoretical framework that allows for such jumping behavior and show that an additional set of "jumper shares" coupled with standard parameters yield sufficient statistics for welfare analysis. Estimating these shares using the Brazilian data, I document that for every marginal real (R$) transferred by the reform, 12 cents were lost due to the efficiency costs of jumping behavior. Simulations suggest that "jumping" behavior substantially affects the welfare analysis of more general reforms.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Rios Rivera, Juan Fernando |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Degree supervisor | Chetty, Raj |
| Thesis advisor | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Thesis advisor | Chetty, Raj |
| Thesis advisor | Pistaferri, Luigi |
| Degree committee member | Pistaferri, Luigi |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Juan Fernando Rios Rivera. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Juan Fernando Rios Rivera
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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