Public Sector Flashcards
(154 cards)
What is a pure public good?
- Non-rivalry in consumption
- Non-excludable
What are three reasons a correlation may be spurious?
Reverse Causality
Chance
Omitted Variable
What is a regression discontinuity design?
Compare statistical units close to a cut-off, as they should be very similar in terms of background characteristics.
Why can providing public goods through the market be inefficient?
Because there are externalities, the free rider problem.
What does the space between indifference curves represent?
The Pareto optimal allocations, if both increase spending they would be better off.
When do difference curves show efficient provision?
When they are tangent to each other.
Is efficient provision always public provision?
No
What are the challenges of public provision?
Crowd-out
Measurement
Preferences, requires perfect knowledge
What are the pros and cons of contracting out?
Good for prices bad for quality
What are the benefits of public education?
-Productivity (positive spillovers in productivity and tax revenues)
- Citizenship (democratic process, reduce crime, settling into society)
- Credit Market Failures (involvement is expensive without gov.)
- Failure to maximise family utility (parents may value their current consumption more than their kid’s future )
- Redistribution (education open to everyone)
How are positive externalities usually internalised?
-Price Mechanism (discount private education)
- Quantity Mechanism(mandate certain level of education)
What is a solution to crowding out?
-Educational vouchers:
Increases income while forcing family to spend on education. Does not create incentives to spend less on education.
What are the main disadvantages of vouchers?
- Excessive school specialisation
- Increase in school segregation
- Inefficient use of government resources
- Non competitive education market
What are the possible explanation for the relationship between wage and education? What does this imply for policy making?
- Education increases human capital
- Education acts as a screening device
If it increases human capital government will want to invest in education, if it acts as screening device then it will not (returns are purely private) .
What did Duflo (2000) do investigating IPRES program in Indonesia? What findings?
-Duflo’s study in Indonesia examines school construction effects:
- More schools lead to increase in education and wages.
- Used variations in the program’s intensity across regions (DiD)
-Identification Assumption: there is no time-varying or region specific effects that correlate with the program also used a bunch of controls.
What are the 5 classifications of taxes?
Payroll taxes(direct)
Individual income taxes (direct)
Corporate income taxes(direct)
Wealth taxes (direct/indirect)
Consumption taxes (indirect)
What is vertical equity?
Those with more resources should pay higher taxes. This means that taxes must be progressive.
What is horizontal equity?
Those with the same resources should pay the same taxes
What are the two ways to levy a commodity tax?
Ad valorem (per value) , Excise tax (per unit)
What is the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit? Which is better for vertical equity?
Tax deduction reduces taxable income, tax credit reduces the amount of tax.
- Tax credits
What are commodity taxes? What are their advantages/disadvantages?
Taxes levied on transactions. Many transactions are public information. BUT, they distort consumer choice.
What are the three rules of tax incidence?
- Statutory burden is not the same as economic burden
- The market side on which the tax is levied is irrelevant for distribution of tax burden
- The more inelastic party bears a larger share of the burden
What did the Chetty et al. experiment did investigating tax salience in 2009 do?
Modified price tags in US stores to show the price with tax:
- Used a triple difference in differences approach to see if the behaviour of shoppers changed.
- Found that the way in which taxes were displayed changed how much the behaviour of consumers was affected. More salient taxes have a bigger impact, consumers under react to taxes that are not salient.
- Used Cosmetics products VS other products in same aisle
- One large store in NC vs other similar stores
- 3 weeks Feb to March VS 2005 and 6 weeks of 2006
What is the formula for DWL of taxation? What is DWL proportional to?
DWL = 0.5elasticity (X/p)*t**2
- To elasticity, the more elastic the more DWL.