Studies in Applied Public Finance

该项目对公共经济学中的几个明显问题进行了研究。第一部分考察了财政制度对国家税收和支出政策动态的影响。这项研究将国家作为“民主实验室”，以阐明不同的制度安排如何影响政府应对财政冲击的方式。它侧重于20世纪80年代的经验，并探索平衡预算规则和反赤字法律如何影响各州应对意外预算赤字的方式。第二种是对税收政策激励效应的更为传统的研究。它关注的是401(K)递延纳税储蓄计划对家庭储蓄决策的影响。在20世纪80年代，这些计划是增长最快的税收优惠储蓄工具，但几乎没有证据表明，这些计划的可用性以及联邦和计划对个人缴费的具体限制如何影响储蓄行为。这个项目帮助填补了这一空白。第三部分也涉及税收政策，但重点关注税收激励如何影响医疗保险需求这一日益重要的问题。这项研究对覆盖范围和覆盖数量的需求弹性进行了新的估计。该项目的第一部分涉及政治经济学中的核心问题之一--财政机构对税收和支出政策的影响，例如平衡预算修正案或增税的绝对多数要求。由于联邦预算机构表现出相对较小的变化，对预算机构的实证研究主要集中在州际或国际比较上。以往研究的困难在于，它们没有考虑到这样一种可能性，即投票反对支出的州更有可能采用某些财政制度。例如，州宪法平衡预算要求在限制政府支出方面的明显有效性，可能只是反映了拥有这些要求的州选民的偏好。这个项目采用了一种新颖而巧妙的方法来解决这个问题。它探讨了在州赤字意外受到冲击后，不同的财政制度如何影响州税收和支出的动态。过去五年，许多州经历了巨大的财政压力，这为探索财政机构和财政结果之间的这种联系提供了一个自然的机会。对近期意外赤字的国家经历进行系统研究，本身也是一个及时而重要的话题。

This project pursues research on several distinct questions in public economics. The first part considers the impact of fiscal institutions on the dynamics of state tax and expenditure policy. This research uses states as "laboratories of democracy" to shed light on how different institutional arrangements affect the way governments respond to fiscal shocks. It focuses on the experience of the 1980s, and explores how balanced budget rules and anti-deficit laws affected the way states respond to unexpected budget deficits. The second is a more traditional study on the incentive effects of tax policy. It focuses on the effects of 401(k) tax-deferred saving plans on household saving decisions. These plans were the fastest growing tax-favored saving vehicle in the 1980s, yet there is little evidence on how the availability of these plans and the federal and program- specific limits on individual contributions, affect saving behavior. This project helps fill this gap. The third part is also concerned with tax policy, but focuses on the increasingly important question of how tax incentives affect the demand for health insurance. The research develops new estimates of the elasticity of demand for both coverage and the amount of coverage. The first part of this project addresses one of the central issues in political economy - the effect of fiscal institutions, such as balanced-budget amendments or supermajority requirements for tax increases, on tax and expenditure policies. Because federal budgetary institutions exhibit relatively little variation, empirical research on budgetary institutions has focused on interstate or international comparisons. The difficulty with past studies is that they do not take into account the possibility that states with anti-spending voters are more likely to adopt certain fiscal institutions. For example, the apparent effectiveness of state constitutional balanced budget requirements in restraining government expenditures could simply reflect the preferences of the voters in states with these requirements. This project takes a novel and ingenious approach to this problem. It explores how different fiscal institutions affect the dynamics of state taxes and spending following an unexpected shock to the state deficit. The last half-decade, when many states have experienced substantial fiscal stress, provides a natural opportunity for exploring this link between fiscal institutions and fiscal outcomes. A systematic study of recent state experience with unexpected deficits is also a timely important topic by itself.