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Public Economics Seminar

Previous Public Economics Seminars are listed here.

01 May 2013
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Family welfare cultures
Magne Mogstad
Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fueled a long standing debate over whether welfare dependency in one generation causes welfare dependency in the next...
13 March 2013
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Active vs. passive decisions and crowd-out in retirement savings: evidence from Denmark
Søren Leth-Petersen Copenhagen
06 March 2013
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Female labour supply, human capital and taxation (with Monica Costa-Dias, Jonathan Shaw and Costas Meghir)
Richard Blundell University College London
This paper presents an approach for incorporating labour supply, work experience investments and education decisions into the analysis of the tax and transfer system. It examines the extent by...
14 November 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
The welfare cost of perceived policy uncertainty: evidence from Social Security (joint with Andrew Samwick)
Erzo Luttmer Dartmouth College
Policy uncertainty can reduce individual welfare in cases when individuals have limited opportunities to mitigate or insure against consumption fluctuations induced by the policy uncertainty. For...
24 October 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Public economics seminar
Nathaniel Hendren Harvard
Across a wide set of non-group insurance markets, applicants are rejected based on observable, often high-risk, characteristics. This paper argues private information, held by the potential...
27 June 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Public economics seminar
Mark Duggan University of Maryland
13 June 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
The hated property tax: salience, tax rates and tax revolts
Caroline Hoxby Stanford University
We hypothesize that high salience explains the unpopularity of the property tax, the level of the property tax, and prevalence of property tax revolts. The Hated Property Tax
23 May 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Public economics seminar
Emmanuel Saez University of California, Berkeley
02 May 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Moral hazard in health insurance: how important is forward looking behavior? (joint with Aviva Aron-Dine, Liran Einav, and Mark Cullen)
Amy Finkelstein Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We investigate whether individuals exhibit forward looking behavior in their response to the non-linear pricing common in health insurance contracts. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that...
14 March 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Social networks and dynamics of tax avoidance: Evidence from a well-defined Norwegian tax shelter
Wojciech Kopczuk Columbia
07 March 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Heterogeneity, demand for insurance and adverse selection
Johannes Spinnewijn London School of Economics
Recent empirical work finds that surprisingly little variation in the demand for insurance is explained by heterogeneity in risks. I distinguish between heterogeneity in risk preferences and risk...
22 February 2012
Institute for Fiscal Studies
The Mirrlees Review and public economics in an age of austerity
Tony Atkinson London School of Economics and Oxford University
16 November 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Behavioural responses to tax notches: evidence from administrative tax records in Pakistan (with Mazhar Waseem)
Henrik Jacobsen Kleven London School of Economics
Using administrative tax records from Pakistan, we investigate behavioral responses to income tax notches-discontinuous jumps in tax liability-offering an unusual and compelling source of...
08 November 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Unemployment and debt in the United States
Peter Diamond MIT
02 November 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Quantile treatment effects of college quality on earnings: evidence from administrative data in Texas
Michael Lovenheim Cornell University
This paper uses administrative data on schooling and earnings from Texas to estimate quantile treatment effects of college quality on earnings. We proxy college quality using the college sector...
19 October 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
The long-term impacts of teachers: teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood
John Friedman Harvard Kennedy School
The use of test-score-based "value-added" (VA) measures to evaluate teachers is highly debated, partly because there is little evidence on whether high VA teachers improve student outcomes in...
05 October 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
The effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle: evidence from regression discontinuity estimates over twenty years
Till von Wachter Columbia University
A goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to reduce the rate of benefit exhaustion and hence increase coverage. However, such extensions potentially come at...
01 June 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Optimal dynamic taxes (joint with Maxim Troshkin and Aleh Tsyvinski)
Michael Golosov Yale
We develop a methodology to derive formulas that facilitate interpretation of the forces determining optimal labor and savings distortions in dynamic settings. The formulas for the labor wedges...
25 May 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Optimal unemployment insurance over business cycle (joint with Pascal Michaillat and Emmanuel Saez)
Camille Landais Stanford University
This paper characterizes optimal unemployment insurance over the business cycle in a model in which unemployment stems from matching frictions (in booms) and job rationing (in recessions). Job...
04 May 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Insurance and taxation over the life cycle (joint with Ivan Werning)
Emmanuel Farhi Harvard
We consider a dynamic Mirrlees economy in a life cycle context and study the optimal insurance arrangement. Individual productivity evolves as a Markov process and is private information. We use a...
09 March 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
A model of focusing in economic choice (joint with Adam Szeidl)
Botond Koszegi University of California, Berkeley
We present a theory of individual choice in which the decisionmaker focuses more on, and hence weights more heavily, attributes on which the options in her consideration set are more different....
23 February 2011
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Incentive schemes for local government: theory and evidence from comprehensive performance assessment in England
Ben Lockwood University of Warwick
This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a simple theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA...
09 February 2011
Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS
Policy analysis with incredible certitude (a Leverhulme Lecture)
Charles Manski Northwestern University
Analyses of public policy regularly express certitude about the consequences of alternative policy choices. Yet policy predictions often are fragile, with conclusions resting on critical...
08 December 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Optimal tax when children's abilities depend on parents' resources (with Matthew Weinzierl)
Alexander Gelber University of Pennsylvania
Micro and macro data suggest that the distribution of resources among families affects children’s future earnings abilities. As a result, an optimal tax policy will treat future ability...
24 November 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Fiscal zoning and sales taxes: do higher sales taxes lead to more retailing and less manufacturing? (joint with Daria Burnes and David Neumark, UC Irvine)
Michelle White University of California, San Diego
We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to encourage retailing. We find that total retail...
03 November 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
The choice of the personal income tax base
Roger Gordon University of California, San Diego
Starting with Mirrlees (1971) and Vickrey (1945), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax. The ideal would be to tax earnings ability. Earnings ability is...
27 October 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Public economics seminar
Christopher Carroll John Hopkins
13 October 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
On the long-run evolution of inheritance: France 1820-2050
Thomas Piketty ENS-EHESS
This paper attempts to document and account for the long run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20%-25% of national income...
24 May 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Bounds on elasticities with optimization frictions: a synthesis of micro and macro evidence on labor supply
Raj Chetty Harvard University
I derive bounds on price elasticities in a dynamic model that is mis-specified due to optimization frictions such as adjustment costs or inattention. The bounds are a function of the observed...
10 May 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Sources of time preference and time-inconsistency: evidence from the field
Dan Silverman University of Michigan
An IFS-STICERD public economics seminar
04 May 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Public economics seminar
Emmanuel Farhi Harvard University
26 April 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Health and wealth in a lifecycle model
John Karl Scholz University of Wisconsin - Madison
This paper presents a model of health investments over the life cycle.
15 March 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Preference heterogeneity and optimal capital taxation
Matthew Weinzierl Harvard Business School
An IFS-STICERD public economics seminar
01 March 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Polish business flat tax and its effect on reported incomes
Wojciech Kopczuk Columbia University
The 2004 tax reform in Poland introduced a broad-base low-rate "flat" tax for business income. For the highest income taxpayers, the marginal tax rate fell from 40% to 19% at the cost of giving up...
22 February 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Consumption and cash-flow taxes in an international setting
Alan Auerbach University of California, Berkeley
The paper to be presented in the seminar models the effects of consumption-type taxes which differ according to the base and location of the tax.
15 February 2010
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Optimal control of externalities in the presence of income taxation
Louis Kaplow Harvard Law School
An IFS-STICERD public economics seminar
14 December 2009
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Quality, inequality, and the measurement of world poverty
Angus Deaton Princeton University
07 December 2009
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Individual accounts and the life-cycle approach to social insurance' (joint with A. Lans Bovenberg and Martin Ino Hansen)
Peter Birch Sørensen University of Copenhagen
An IFS public economics seminar.
30 November 2009
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Why can modern governments tax so much? An agency model of firms as fiscal intermediaries (joint with Henrik Jacobsen Kleven and Emmanuel Saez)
Claus Thustrup Kreiner Copenhagen
An IFS public economics seminar.
19 October 2009
Institute for Fiscal Studies
Do child tax benefits affect the wellbeing of children? evidence from Canadian child benefit expansions (joint with Mark Stabile)
Kevin Milligan British Columbia
An IFS public economics seminar.
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Policy Evaluation Methods

21 May 13 - 24 May 13
cemmap/PEPA Training Course
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The Micro and Macro of Job Polarization
20 May 2013
IFS Seminar
Title to be confirmed
10 Jun 2013
IFS Seminar
Title to be confirmed
08 Jul 2013
IFS Seminar
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