Calendrier du 24 novembre 2022
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 24/11/2022 de 16:00 à 17:15
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R1-07 (côté ENS)
MULLINS Joseph (Minnesota)
Designing Cash Transfers in the Presence of Children’s Human Capital Formation
This paper finds that accounting for the human capital development of children has a quanti-
tatively large effect on the true costs and benefits of providing cash assistance to single mothers
in the United States. A dynamic model of work, welfare participation, and parental investment in
children introduces a formal apparatus for calculating costs and benefits when individuals respond
to incentives. The model provides a tractable outcome equation in which a policy’s effect on child
skills can be understood through its impact on two economic resources in the household – time
and money – and the share of each resource as factors in the production of skills. These key causal
parameters are cleanly identified by policy variation through the 1990s. The model also admits
simple and interpretable formulae for optimal nonlinear transfers in the style of Mirrlees (1971),
with novel features arising when child skill formation is accounted for. Using a broadly conservative
empirical strategy, estimates imply that optimal transfers are about 20% more generous than the
US benchmark, and shaped very differently. In contrast to current policies, the optimal policy dis-
courages labor supply at the bottom of the income distribution due to the costly estimated impacts
of work on child development. The finding underscores the importance of reconciling results in the
literature on the developmental effects of maternal employment. Finally, a counterfactual model
exercise suggests that changes to the welfare and tax environment after 1996 had negative average
effects both on maternal welfare and child skill outcomes, with a significant degree of redistribution
across latent dimensions.
Texte intégral
Behavior seminar
Du 24/11/2022 de 14:30 à 15:30
En Ligne
STRINGER Eliza-Jane (London School of Economics)
*People Versus Machines: The Impact of Being in an Automatable Job on Australian Worker's Mental Health and Life Satisfaction
This study explores the effect on mental health and life satisfaction of working in an automatable job. We utilise an Australian panel dataset (HILDA), and estimate models that include individual fixed effects, to estimate the association between automatable work and proxies of wellbeing. Overall, we find evidence that automatable work has a small, detrimental impact on the mental health and life satisfaction of workers within some industries, particularly those with higher levels of job automation risk, such as manufacturing. Furthermore, we find no strong trends to suggest that any particular demographic group is disproportionately impacted across industries. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications. We also find evidence of adaptation to these effects after one-year tenure on the job, indicating a limited role for firm policy.
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 24/11/2022 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
GüçERI Irem (Oxford)
Tax Policy, Investment and Profit-Shifting
Multinational firms (MNEs) often pay no tax in high-tax countries because they shift a large fraction of their taxable income to tax havens. We build a model of tax policy and investment that incorporates unobserved heterogeneity in MNEs' profit-shifting capability and different costs of setting up a tax minimization network. The model matches the distribution of taxable profit and investment in detailed UK tax returns data. We use the model to quantify the policy trade-off between raising tax revenue by combating tax avoidance (via, for example, a Global Minimum Tax) and attracting investment. The results solve a longstanding puzzle in the existing profit-shifting literature: our model reconciles the differences between previous micro- and macro-level estimates of profit-shifting elasticities by accounting for extensive margin decisions (to report positive or no taxable profit in a jurisdiction). We test the model's predictions using a reform in Italy that limited the profit-shifting activities of Italian MNEs as a quasi-natural experiment.