School choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement. To evaluate the impact on participants, we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school ...admission in the Chicago Public Schools. Compared to those students who lose lotteries, students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions, including peer achievement and attainment levels. Nonetheless, we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures. Lottery winners do, however, experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures, such as self-reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates.
This paper analyzes the link between rising city crime rates and urban flight. Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population. Almost all of the ...crime-related population decline is attributable to increased out-migration rather than a decrease in new arrivals. Households that leave the city because of crime are much more likely to remain within the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) than those that leave the city for other reasons. Migration decisions of highly educated households and those with children are particularly responsive to changes in crime. Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation.
Previous research on unemployment insurance (UI) has emphasized the program's effect on individual search behavior. This state‐contingent income may also reduce the labor supply of family members ...during the unemployment spell. We investigate this question within the context of wives' labor supply responses to their husbands' unemployment spells. We find strong “crowdout” of this form of family self‐insurance; our estimates imply that for each dollar of UI receipt wives earn up to 73 cents less. The reduction in spousal hours of work is over 40% as large as previous estimates of the effect of UI on search time of husbands.
We ask whether attitudes toward government play a causal role in the evasion of US personal income taxes. As turnover elections move voters in partisan counties into and out of alignment with the ...party of the president, we find with alignment (i) taxpayers report more easily evaded forms of income; (ii) suspect EITC claims decrease; and (iii) audits triggered and audits found to owe additional tax decrease. Coupled with evidence that alignment leads to more favorable views on taxation and spending, our results provide real world evidence that a positive outlook on government lowers tax evasion.
We study how the introduction of a rigorous teacher evaluation system in a large urban school district affects the quality composition of teacher turnovers. With the implementation of the new system, ...we document increased turnover among the least effective teachers and decreased turnover among the most effective teachers, relative to teachers in the middle of the distribution. Our findings demonstrate that the alignment between personnel decisions and teacher effectiveness can be improved through targeted personnel policies. However, the change in the composition of exiters brought on by the policy we study is too small to meaningfully impact student achievement.
Julie Berry Cullen of University of California, San Diego reviews, “Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know” by Leonard E. Burman and Joel Slemrod. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: ...“Explores how the U.S. tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be made better. Discusses the basics of taxes; personal income taxes; business income taxes; taxing spending; other kinds of taxes; taxes and the economy; the hidden welfare state; the burden of taxation; tax administration and enforcement; misperceptions and reality in the policy process; tax myths; and tax reform. Burman is Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs in the Maxwell School and is with the Departments of Public Administration and Economics and the Law School at Syracuse University. Slemrod is Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, Director of the Office of Tax Policy Research in the Ross School of Business, and Professor and Chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan.”
Performance evaluation of leaders is challenging in contexts where production processes are complex and there are conflicting pressures from interest groups. In the education context, school ...accountability systems assemble rich data and report both categorical rating and the underlying student pass rates that determine it, permitting the investigation of how different information affects labor market outcomes of school leaders. Applying regression discontinuity methods that by design hold effectiveness constant, we find sizable positive impacts on Texas elementary school principal retention and salaries for crossing the unacceptable–acceptable boundary but not for crossing higher rating cutoffs. These patterns suggest that public stigma from receiving an unacceptable rating plays a role in the unequal treatment of equally effective principals. While the labor market penalty could theoretically improve the distribution of principal quality through well-targeted departures, there is substantial overlap in principal value-added distributions across rating categories, and failure to cross the acceptable threshold does not lead to future improvements in school performance.
How does the tax law affect individual incentives to engage in entrepreneurial risk taking? We first show theoretically that taxes can affect incentives due to differences in tax rates on business ...vs. wage income, due to differences in the marginal tax rates faced on losses vs. profits through a progressive rate structure and through the option to incorporate, and due to risk sharing with the government. We then provide empirical evidence using U.S. individual tax return data that each of these aspects of the tax law have clear effects on individual behavior, and together have had large effects on the amount of entrepreneurial risk taking.
Though the traditional literature in fiscal federalism argues that the Federal government should have primary responsibility for income redistribution, U.S. states are in fact actively engaged in ...redistribution. This paper develops a positive model of the respective roles of state and Federal governments that can rationalize this observation. Redistribution by states creates positive horizontal fiscal externalities to other states due to migration, but negative vertical fiscal externalities to the national government due to changes in reported taxable income. We forecast that states will engage in at least some redistribution, though to a lesser degree the greater are mobility relative to taxable income elasticities. The Federal government can then choose the degree of Federal redistribution to assure that the net externalities are zero. Given such policies, we then estimate the welfare weights and migration elasticities for different income groups that would generate the effective net tax schedules observed in the U.S. The parameter estimates are broadly plausible, suggesting that the model can help explain the division of responsibilities for redistribution between state and Federal governments.
► We forecast states will always engage in some redistribution, regardless of the amount of Federal redistribution. ► Forecasted state redistribution is lower the greater are migration elasticities. ► The optimal Federal response is to design the Federal tax schedule to address interstate spillovers. ► Optimal Federal tax rates are then higher the greater are migration elasticities. ► The welfare weights and migration elasticities implied by observed state and Federal net tax schedules are broadly plausible.
In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, ...but more generally, the economic futures of the students at the bottom of the human capital distribution remain dismal. In our view, expanding access to educational options that focus on life skills and work experience, as opposed to a focus on traditional definitions of academic success, represents the most cost-effective, broadly implementable source of improvements for this group. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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