Effects of Family Policy Reforms in Norway: Results from a Joint Labour Supply and Childcare Choice Microsimulation Analysis*

Mothers of pre‐school children represent one part of the population that might be able to increase its labour supply. We discuss the effects of family policy changes that encourage the labour supply of these mothers, such as childcare fee reductions and increased availability of centre‐based care. The effects of policy changes are described by using a joint labour supply and childcare choice decision model. Detailed empirical results are provided with respect to mothers' labour supply, families' childcare choices, public expenditures, and distributions of income and money metric utility.     

Comparing in‐work benefits and the reward to work for families with children in the US and the UK

The income transfer systems for low‐income families in the US and the UK try both to reduce poverty and to encourage work. In‐work benefits are a key part of both countries' strategies through the earned income tax credit and the working families' tax credit (and predecessors) respectively. But tax credits are only one part of the whole tax and welfare system. In‐work benefits, taxes and welfare benefits combine in both countries to provide good financial incentives for lone parents to do minimum‐wage work, but poorer incentives to increase earnings further. But direct comparisons of budget constraints hide important points of detail. First, not enough is known about what determines take‐up of in‐work benefits. Second, the considerable differences in assessment and payment mechanisms and frequency between EITC and WFTC mean that low‐income families in the US and the UK may respond very differently to apparently similar financial incentives.     

Childcare Assistance: Are Subsidies or Tax Credits Better?

We evaluate price subsidies and tax credits for childcare. We focus on partnered women's labour supply, household income and welfare, demand for childcare and government expenditure. Using Australian data, we estimate a joint, discrete structural model of labour supply and childcare demand. We introduce two methodological innovations – a more flexible quantity constraint that total formal and informal childcare hours are at least as large as the mother's labour supply and the explicit inclusion of maternal childcare in the utility function as a proxy for child development. We find that tax credits are more effective than subsidies in terms of increasing average hours worked and household income. However, tax credits disproportionately benefit wealthier and more educated women. Price subsidies, while less efficient, have positive redistributional effects.     

The Impact of Children on Women's Paid Work*

This paper investigates how and when differences in work behaviour between men and women develop, focusing on the evolution of the gender gaps over the period of family development. The findings support the theory that gender differences in the formal labour market stem from the presence of children in the home and that childbirth and children entering school are critical times in women's employment. Births mark a dramatic decline in participation in work for women, while school entry is a time of considerable turnover in participation. The length of absence from work following a subsequent birth is closely related to whether the mother was in work between births, while maternity pay and leave entitlements appear to influence the precise timing of the return to work. In addition, a return to work following birth is often only temporary. The gradual decline in women's relative wages following the first birth appears to stem from the accumulation of several shorter periods of unusually low wage growth for women around the times of birth and school entry. There is also a sharp movement into part‐time work for women following childbirth and a transition towards non‐permanent positions and non‐supervisory roles at both critical points.     

Apply with Caution: Introducing UK‐Style In‐Work Support in Germany*

Estimates of the labour supply effects of recent UK reforms in the area of direct taxes and benefits show that policy can have significant influence on the level of employment. We confirm this in a simulation of an in‐work support system introduced into the German tax and benefit system. Our simulation results suggest that introducing in‐work tax credits in Germany would increase the employment of single individuals by over 105,000 but would result in a reduction of labour supply among individuals living in couples by about 70,000, among both women and men. The result found for men is especially important as it is markedly different from all results for the UK, where the net response among men has always been found to be positive. Our estimation results call for a high degree of caution as far as ‘importing’ UK‐style tax credits to Germany is concerned. In‐work support based on family income would reinforce the existing work disincentives for secondary earners, reducing the employment levels of both men and women living in couples.     

Joint Taxation and the Labour Supply of Married Women: Evidence from the Canadian Tax Reform of 1988*

The Canadian federal tax reform of 1988 replaced a spousal tax exemption with a non‐refundable tax credit. This reduced the‘jointness’of the tax system: after the reform, secondary earners’effective‘first dollar’marginal tax rates no longer depended on the marginal tax rates of their spouses. In practice, the effective‘first dollar’marginal tax rates faced by women with high‐income husbands were particularly reduced. Using difference‐indifference estimators, we find a significant increase in labour force participation among women married to higher‐income husbands.     

Why Are Mothers Working Longer Hours in Austria than in Germany? A Comparative Microsimulation Analysis*

Labour force participation rates of mothers in Austria and Germany are similar; however, full‐time employment rates are much higher among Austrian mothers. In order to find out to what extent these differences can be attributed to differences in the tax‐transfer system, we perform a comparative microsimulation exercise. After estimating structural labour supply models for both countries, we interchange two important institutional characteristics of the two countries ‐ namely, (i) the definition of the tax unit within the personal income tax and (ii) the parental leave benefit scheme. As our analysis shows, differences in mothers’employment patterns can partly be explained by the different tax systems: while Germany has a system of joint taxation with income splitting for married couples, Austria taxes everyone individually, which leads to lower marginal tax rates for secondary earners than in the German system.     

Unemployment and workers' compensation programmes: rationale,design, labour supply and income support

I examine the unemployment insurance (UI) and workers' compensation (WC) insurance programmes, concentrating on labour supply, insurance and income redistribution. UI and WC increase the time employees spend out of work. Elasticities of lost work time that incorporate both the incidence and duration of claims are centred at 1.0 for UI and between 0.5 and 1.0 for WC. These elasticities are larger than elasticities typically found in studies of wage effects on hours worked by men, probably because UI and WC lead to short‐run variation in wages with mostly a substitution effect and the programmes alter the participation margin. Some good evidence suggests that UI smooths the consumption of the unemployed and more clearly indicates that UI progressively redistributes resources. There is substantial evidence that injured workers suffer material hardships even with WC programmes, but research has not provided an overall picture of the insurance and redistributive aspects of WC.     

Tax credits,income support,and partnership decisions

This paper considers the potential impact of welfare benefits on the partnership status of women in the UK. Using recent policy reforms to identify the response rate, it was found that a ￡100/week welfare benefit “partnership penalty” reduces the probability of a woman having a partner by seven percentage points. The model is also used to explore the potential effects of the recent tax credit reforms on partnership rates; it was found that while the 1999 WFTC reform improved partnership incentives, this effect was effectively undone by the 2003 WTC/CTC reform.      

Labor Unions and Forms of Corporate Liquidity

We examine how the presence of labor unions affects a firm's choice of corporate liquidity between bank lines of credit and corporate cash holdings. We find that firms in industries with higher unionization rates hold a higher fraction of corporate liquidity in the form of bank lines of credit. We divide the firms into sub‐groups and find that this positive relationship holds for firms that are not in a state with right‐to‐work legislation and for firms that are financially constrained. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that a firm chooses the forms of corporate liquidity to take advantage of the bargaining benefits associated with bank lines of credit.     

Funding a PAYG pension system: the case of Italy

Italy is characterised by a mature pay‐as‐you‐go social security system and by particularly adverse population projections. Given these trends, the social security contribution rate is expected to increase above its current high level. This hinders the development of employer‐provided pension funds and introduces a significant wedge between labour cost and earnings that discourages both labour demand and labour supply. Any proposal to reduce payroll taxes and to reform the system in the direction of partial funding has to cope with the state of Italian public finances. Italy has to comply with the Stability and Growth Pact that imposes constraints on budget deficit and debt trends. Using micro data from the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth and official population projections, we estimate future employment trends under different demographic and macroeconomic scenarios and compute the cost of the transition. We show that it would be substantially reduced if positive effects on employment were induced by the payroll tax reduction.     

How Taxes and Welfare Benefits Affect Work Incentives: A Life‐Cycle Perspective

Personal taxes and benefits affect the incentive to work over the life cycle by altering income–age profiles, insuring against adverse shocks and changing the returns to human capital. In this paper, we show how a life‐cycle perspective alters our impression of how the UK tax and benefit system affects women's work incentives. Given that actual longitudinal data conflate age effects, cohort effects and policy effects, and, in the UK, are not available covering the full life cycle, we use simulated data produced by a rich, dynamic structural model of female labour supply and human capital that incorporates family formation and fertility. We find that individuals experience considerable variability in work incentives across life that outweighs the variability across individuals. Changes in the presence of children and a partner, as well as the level of any partner's earnings, are key to explaining these patterns: work incentives vary dramatically depending on family composition and the earnings of any partner, especially for the lower‐skilled, and most women experience a number of different family types during the course of their lives.     

Government Credit,a Double‐Edged Sword: Evidence from the China Development Bank

Using proprietary data from the China Development Bank (CDB), this paper examines the effects of government credit on firm activities. Tracing the effects of government credit across different levels of the supply chain, I find that CDB industrial loans to state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) crowd out private firms in the same industry but crowd in private firms in downstream industries. On average, a $1 increase in CDB SOE loans leads to a $0.20 decrease in private firms' assets. Moreover, CDB infrastructure loans crowd in private firms. I use exogenous timing of municipal politicians' turnover as an instrument for CDB credit flows.     

Income Redistribution,Consumer Credit,and Keeping Up with the Riches

In this study, we set up a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with upward looking consumption comparison and show that consumption externalities are an important driver of consumer credit dynamics. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy's capital stock, own the firms and supply credit, and workers, who supply labor and demand credit to finance consumption. Furthermore, workers condition their consumption choice on the investors' level of consumption. We estimate the model and find a significant keeping up mechanism by matching business cycle statistics. In reproducing credit moments, our proposed model significantly outperforms a model version in which we abstract from consumption externalities.     

Does Credit Competition Affect Small‐Firm Finance?

While relaxation of geographical restrictions on bank expansion permitted banking organizations to expand across state lines, it allowed states to erect barriers to branch expansion. These differences in states' branching restrictions affect credit supply. In states more open to branching, small firms borrow at interest rates 80 to 100 basis points lower than firms operating in less open states. Firms in open states also are more likely to borrow from banks. Despite this evidence that interstate branch openness expands credit supply, we find no effect of variation in state restrictions on branching on the amount that small firms borrow.     

公众为何参与股市:经济增长、货币政策还是市场状态?

基于中国证券登记结算公司提供的31省投资者开户数目,本文重点研究经济增长、货币政策以及金融市场发展对公众股市有限参与行为的影响。研究表明,经济发展与社会互动显著提高股市参与度,全国货币量和信贷水平增加(宽松的货币政策)并未对股市参与起促进作用,相反房地产市场发展显著降低股市参与度。此外,较高的市场收益显著提升投资者参与股市的程度,但投资风险特别是短期投资风险并未阻碍公众参与股市,这反映了我国公众投资的投机特点。本文研究结论为我国监管部门提供了明晰的政策建议,即加大投资者教育并提升正确投资理念。     

Quantitative easing in an open economy—Not a liquidity but a reserve trap

Expansionary monetary policy is ineffective in a liquidity trap. In another case, which we call a “reserve trap,” money supply increase is trapped in bank reserves; there is no credit expansion through the banking system. In such case, quantitative easing (QE) will not boost credit to the real sector and revitalize the economy. To analyze a reserve trap, we modify the open economy model to include multiple interest rates. Trade is included since exports can be financed externally even during domestic credit constriction. We show the conditions under which QE can lead to currency depreciation and trigger an export-led recovery.     

Medical Labour Supply and the Production of Healthcare

Medical labour markets are important because of their size and the importance of medical labour in the production of healthcare and in subsequent patient outcomes. We present a summary of important trends in the UK medical labour market, and we review the latest research on factors that determine medical labour supply and the impact of labour on patient outcomes. The topics examined include: the responsiveness of labour supply to changes in wages, regulation and other incentives; factors that determine the wide variation in physician practice and style; and the effect of teams and management quality on patient outcomes. This literature reveals that while labour supply is relatively unresponsive to changes in wages, medical personnel do react strongly to other incentives, even in the short run. This is likely to have consequences for the quality of care provided to patients. We set out a series of unanswered questions in the UK setting, including: the importance of non‐financial incentives in recruiting and retaining medical staff; how individuals can be incentivised to work in particular specialties and regions; and how medical teams can be best organised to improve care.     

Trade Credit and Industry Dynamics: Evidence from Trucking Firms

Long payment terms are a strong impediment to the entry and survival of liquidity‐constrained firms. To test this idea and its implications, I consider the effect of a reform restricting the trade credit supply of French trucking firms. In a difference‐in‐differences setting, I find that trucking firms' corporate default probability decreases by 25% following the restriction. The effect is persistent, concentrated among liquidity‐constrained firms, and not offset by a decrease in profits. The restriction also triggers an increase in the entry of small trucking firms.     

The Importance of Adverse Selection in the Credit Card Market: Evidence from Randomized Trials of Credit Card Solicitations

Analyzing unique data from multiple large‐scale randomized marketing trials of preapproved credit card solicitations by a large financial institution, we find that consumers responding to the lender's inferior solicitation offers have poorer credit quality attributes. This finding supports the argument that riskier type borrowers are liquidity or credit constrained and, thus, have higher reservation loan interest rates. We also find a more severe deterioration ex post in the credit quality of the booked accounts of inferior offer types relative to superior offers. After controlling for a cardholder's observable risk attributes, demographic characteristics, and adverse economic shocks, we find that cardholders who responded to the inferior credit card offers are significantly more likely to default ex post. Our results provide evidence on the importance of adverse selection effects in the credit card market.