Collaborative Research: Novel Approaches Toward Estimating the Causal Impact of Wealth

财富对行为的影响是政策制定者非常感兴趣的问题。例如，许多重要的公共政策--如改变退休制度、财产税或福利支出的一次性部分--往往涉及财富转移。此外，收入再分配的成本和收益完全取决于人们对财富变化的反应。因此，了解人们如何(以及在多大程度上)对财富的变化做出反应，对于预测和评估广泛的公共政策非常重要。尽管有大量文献研究了财富对大量经济和非经济结果的影响，但对于财富效应在各种环境中的重要性和程度，仍没有达成多少共识。这种缺乏共识的原因很可能是与可信地估计财富效应相关的重大实际挑战的结果。这项研究试图通过对瑞典三大彩票玩家群体的研究，提高我们对财富对各种行为和结果的因果影响的理解。由于奖品是随机分配的，这使得使用随机控制设计的公认和无争议的框架来产生可信的估计变得相对简单。本研究大纲中描述的项目都是基于对最近收集的三个瑞典彩票玩家样本的分析，这些样本包括300多万人。在瑞典统计局的帮助下，玩家与基于人口的行政记录进行了匹配，这些记录包含了关于就业、收入、健康和许多其他变量的年度信息(大多数变量从20世纪70年代末开始每年都有)。除了关于彩民本身的信息，数据还包括关于彩民的配偶、伴侣和孩子的信息。总体而言，合并后的数据集有几个独特的优势。首先，由于球员已经与全人口的管理数据进行了匹配，因此由于自然减员或无反应而产生的偏差最小。其次，由于样本量很大，这些数据可以用来调查许多不同人口群体的差异。最后，奖项的数额有很大的差异，这意味着有可能估计奖项的非线性影响。总体而言，这些数据包含13000名被随机分配的人，他们被随机分配到超过瑞典平均年收入的人，另外1500人被随机分配到超过平均年收入十倍的人。收集的数据将用于三个独立的研究项目。第一个项目考察了财富冲击如何影响劳动收入、配偶劳动力供应、退休行为、社会保险覆盖率和职业转换。这些结果涵盖了一系列有趣的劳动力市场影响，人们可能会在财富意外增长的情况下观察到这些影响。关于配偶收入的信息将使按个人和按家庭对财富影响的单独估计成为可能，这也可能揭示家庭内部决策的经济模型。第二个项目探索财富如何影响一系列丰富的健康指标，如死因、药物处方和住院。这一项目的发现有望为解决社会科学中长期存在的争论提供重要的一步，这一争论是关于健康中强烈的社会经济梯度在多大程度上反映了财富对健康的因果影响。第三个项目探索了财富对政治参与(如选民投票率和政治职位提名)以及政治态度的影响。这个项目本质上是高度跨学科的，应该引起政治学家和经济学家的极大兴趣。虽然政治学和经济学的现有研究已经证明了社会经济地位和政治参与之间的强烈相关性，但对这些结果的解释仍然存在争议。该项目丰富的数据和可信的研究设计有望对财富对政治参与和政治态度的各种不同衡量标准的影响进行无争议的估计。

The effect of wealth on behavior is of substantial interest to policymakers. For example, many important public policies -- such as changes to retirement systems, property taxes, or lump-sum components of welfare payments -- often involve transfers of wealth. Moreover, the costs and benefits to income redistribution depend on exactly how people respond to changes in their wealth. Therefore, understanding how (and by how much) people respond to changes in wealth is important for predicting and evaluating a wide range of public policies.Despite a rich literature studying the effects of wealth on a large number of economic and non-economic outcomes, there remains little consensus on the importance and magnitude of wealth effects in a wide variety of settings. This lack of consensus is likely a result of the substantial practical challenges associated with credibly estimating wealth effects. This research tries to improve our understanding of the causal effects of wealth on a wide range of behaviors and outcomes by studying three large populations of Swedish lottery players. Because prizes are assigned at random, this makes it relatively straightforward to produce credible estimates using the well-accepted and uncontroversial framework of a randomized controlled design.The projects described in this research outline are all based on the analysis of three recently collected samples of Swedish lottery players, comprising more than three million individuals. With the help of Statistics Sweden, the players have been matched to population-based administrative records containing annual information about employment, earnings, health, and a number of other variables (with most of the variables available annually beginning in the late 1970s). Besides information on the lottery players themselves, the data also contains information on the players' spouses, partners, and children. Overall, the combined data set has several unique advantages. First, there are minimal biases due to attrition or non-response since the players have been matched to population-wide administrative data. Second, because of the large sample size, the data can be used to investigate differences across many different demographic groups. Lastly, there is significant variation in the amount of prizes awarded, which means that it is possible to estimate non-linear effects of the prizes. In total, the data contain 13,000 individuals who were randomly assigned more than the average annual income in Sweden and another 1,500 who were randomly assigned more than ten times the average annual income.The assembled data will be used for three separate research projects. The first project examines how wealth shocks impact labor earnings, spousal labor supply, retirement behavior, social insurance take-up, and occupational switching. These outcomes span a wide range of interesting labor market effects that one might expect to observe in response to unexpected increases in wealth. The information on spousal earnings will enable separate estimates of wealth effects by individual and by household, which may also shed light on economic models of decision-making within the household.The second project explores how wealth impacts a rich set of proxies for health, such as cause of death, drug prescriptions, and hospitalizations. The findings from this project will hopefully provide an important step toward resolving a long-running debate in social science about the extent to which the strong socioeconomic gradient in health reflects the causal effect of wealth on health.The third project explores the effect of wealth on political participation (such as voter turnout and nomination for political office) as well as political attitudes. This project is highly interdisciplinary in nature and should be of considerable interest to both political scientists and economists. While existing research in political science and economics has documented a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and political participation, the interpretation of these results remains controversial. The rich data and credible research design in this project will hopefully result in uncontroversial estimates of the effect of wealth on a number of different measures of political participation and political attitudes.