Public Finance and Welfare. Essays in Honor of C. Ward. Macy PDF Download

Author: Paul Lincoln Kleinsorge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiscal policy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Author: Isaac Issa Hacamo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
This dissertation explores the relationship between finance and welfare, focusing on how the expansion of credit supply in the beginning of the 2000s, leading to the 2007 financial crisis, affected U.S. households. This dissertation helps advance the study of how financial policies affect households' well- being. In the first chapter, I study the effect of access to credit on family structure. There is a large debate over the welfare effects of the early 2000s housing boom and bust. One potentially important welfare effect is the impact of mortgage credit expansion on family structure. Exploiting pre-housing boom variation on the distribution of old homeowners who live alone and are older than 65, I conduct within-county analysis with zip code level data to causally identify the effect of access to credit on fertility outcomes through a channel associated with a more efficient reallocation of the existing housing stock among households. I examine two other housing channels, house wealth gains and new construction, and show that the most relevant channel is the reallocation, which allows young households to access space by either moving to larger homes or achieving homeownership earlier in their life-cycle. A one standard deviation increase in reallocation leads to a 6.4% increase in fertility from 2000 to 2006. The same increase in house prices leads to only a 2.7% increase, and in new construction leads to a 1.5% decline in fertility from 2000 to 2006. I estimate that approximately 500,000 babies were born between 2000 and 2006 because of the reallocation channel. In the second chapter, I study the effect of housing demand on house prices through an interest rate channel. In the last housing boom, strong house price growth only lasted until 2005. Why did house price growth slowed down in 2006? This chapter studies the effect of interest rate changes on housing demand at the end of a housing boom and the subsequent effect on house prices. I use three different proxies for housing demand, based on Google search data on search terms likely to be used during the process of purchasing a home, such as "remax", "construction", or "real estate". A one- standard deviation increase in the change in interest in purchasing a home from 2005 to 2006, measured by the Google search volume, leads to a 0.4 standard deviation increase in contemporaneous house price growth. To identify the interest rate channel, I first compute a household income threshold for each county, defined as the necessary income to afford an interest-rate-only mortgage on a county's average loan in 2005. I then exploit the slope of the county's income distribution around this affordability threshold to estimate the fraction of households that, after an increase in mortgage interest rates from 2005 to 2006, could no longer afford to pay an interest-rate-only mort- gage. I use this fraction as an instrumental variable for housing demand. The IV beta is remarkably close to the OLS beta, and confirms the large effect of housing demand on house prices in 2006 through an interest rate channel. This chapter sheds light on the transition process between the housing boom in the 2000s and the subsequent financial crisis, and contributes to a better understanding of the impact of monetary policy on housing demand and house prices at the end of a housing boom.

Author: Charles Ward Macy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Author: Lucas Husted
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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It is the hope of the author that economists and policymakers can use the conclusions herein when considering and drafting future programs that aim to assist those at the margin of society or those who will suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate disasters.

Author: Paul Lincoln Kleinsorge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages :

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Author: Fernando Lopez (Professor of finance)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the determinants of individual financial decision making and the welfare implications of those decisions. In the first essay, I consider an important dimension of individual welfare, namely mental health, to study whether the use of different financial services helped to withstand the damage caused by a large earthquake that hit Chile in February 2010. Using a rich nationally representative panel data set and geographic differences in ground shaking caused by the earthquake as an exogenous source of damage, I find that earthquake insurance reduced the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by more than 50% among individuals who lived in properties that were damaged by the earthquake. However, I find no significant effects for the amount of savings and bank relationships. Overall, these results suggest that the welfare impact of financial services is driven by the ability to transfer resources across states of the world, but not through time. In the second essay, I study the extent to which low income students in the U.S. understand and take into consideration the financial aspects of their higher education. Using a rich data set from a large U.S. non-profit organization, I find that low income post-secondary students are poorly informed about three main financial aspects of their higher education: expected income, financing costs and opportunity cost of being enrolled. This result holds for students who are academically talented, have been exposed to financial education (including a semester-long personal finance class) and relevant financial experiences. Furthermore, preliminary results of a randomized controlled trial (N=117) suggest that an hour-long financial education workshop on the main financial aspects of college increases students' GPA by 0.2 points (p-value=0.15) and their ability to receive financial aid from the non-profit organization by 11.4 percentage points (p-value=0.25). Overall, these results suggest that (lack of) financial literacy can affect both educational attainment and financial outcomes of low income post-secondary students. In the third essay, I study if civic capital, defined as the set of values and beliefs within a community that promote cooperation for socially valuable purposes (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2011), affects the use of deposit accounts among Chilean households. Using an institutional setting of limited supply side barriers for access to deposit accounts and a rich household data set, I find that households from areas with higher levels of civic capital, measured as the rate of registration to vote, are more likely to have savings accounts and hold larger amounts in those accounts. This association is stronger for households that are less educated and less intensive users of communication and information devices such as phone, computer and the internet. These results are consistent with the idea that civic capital helps to overcome educational and informational barriers that limit the demand for deposit accounts.

Author: George Watson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429879636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Originally published in 1957, The Unservile State looks at the theme of liberty in the Welfare State. Has it survived Welfare – is it even better for it? What of Parliament and our civil liberties? Does the present state of property distribution, of industry, agriculture and our social services satisfy the Liberal mind? And what would a liberal policy for foreign and Commonwealth affairs be like? These are some of the questions which this book sets out to answer. It is the first full scale study of the attitudes and policies of contemporary British Liberalism.

Author: Sharada Sridhar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Chapter 3 studies the efficiency of government healthcare subsidization schemes, with a specific interest in the underlying mechanisms that financially motivate hospitals to serve the uninsured. We study a Disproportionate Care Hospital (DSH) payment scheme that supports hospitals treating a disproportionately higher fraction of uninsured patients. We demonstrate that DSH payments lead to social welfare loss, especially in a system with large and small hospitals, compared to the second-best mechanism. We then use the setting of the Global Payment Program (GPP) program, which compliments DSH by providing primary care, to show that direct and assured payment for primary care improves social welfare. Overall, my dissertation seeks to understand the development of an equilibrium contract structure between financial institutions and the poor, examine methods of greater efficiency, and evaluate the impact of government interventions to alleviate tensions between these parties.

Author: Laurence J. Kotlikoff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262263344
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 596

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Book Description
This collection of essays, coauthored with other distinguished economists, offers new perspectives on saving, intergenerational economic ties, retirement planning, and the distribution of wealth. The book links life-cycle microeconomic behavior to important macroeconomic outcomes, including the roughly 50 percent postwar decline in America's rate of saving and its increasing wealth inequality. The book traces these outcomes to the government's five-decade-long policy of transferring, in the form of annuities, ever larger sums from young savers to old spenders. The book presents new theoretical and empirical analyses of altruism that rule out the possibility that private intergenerational transfers have offset those by the government.While rational life-cycle behavior can explain broad economic outcomes, the book also shows that a significant minority of households fail to make coherent life-cycle saving and insurance decisions. These mistakes are compounded by reliance on conventional financial planning tools, which the book compares with Economic Security Planner (ESPlanner), a new life-cycle financial planning software program. The application of ESPlanner to U.S. data indicates that most Americans approaching retirement age are saving at much lower rates than they should be, given potential major cuts in Social Security benefits.