Tax Base and Crowding‐in Effects of Balanced Budget Fiscal Policy

A dynamic general equilibrium business cycle model is constructed with staggered price adjustment, monopolistic wage setting and distortionary taxation. The government purchases goods, runs an unemployment benefit system and balances its budget through a proportional tax on labour income. A temporary tax‐financed increase in government expenditures can lower the tax rate through a demand‐induced widening of the tax base. It is shown analytically that this allows private consumption to rise, under realistic conditions, despite the negative wealth effect of increased fiscal spending.     

Virtually No Effect? Different Uses of Classroom Computers and their Effect on Student Achievement

Most studies find little to no effect of classroom computers on student achievement. We suggest that this null effect may combine positive effects of computer uses without equivalently effective alternative traditional teaching practices and negative effects of uses that substitute more effective teaching practices. Our correlated random effects models exploit within‐student between‐subject variation in different computer uses in the international TIMSS test. We find positive effects of using computers to look up information and negative effects of using computers to practice skills, resulting in overall null effects. Effects are larger for students with high socioeconomic status and mostly confined to developed countries.     

西方国家政治整合的五条途径

西方国家宪政层面上的制度化政治反对模式主要有五种,其主要类别有:(1)英国:以议会为中心,但少数党派无否决权及共同执政权的反对模式;(2)德国:以议会为中心,但少数党派有很强的否决权及共同执政权的反对模式;(3)法国:议会-总统政治反对模式;(4)美国:分权政治反对模式;(5)瑞士:直接民主反对模式.本文对这五种政治反对模式进行了详细的比较研究.     

Ein Tag ohne Pflege

Einen akuten und vollst?ndigen Pflegemangel haben wir in Deutschland noch nie erlebt. Das hat nur einen Grund: Beruflich Pflegende sind gepr?gt von einem hohen Ma? an ethischer Verantwortung, zu Recht liegen sie im Ranking der vertrauenswürdigen Berufe auf Platz drei. Andere Berufsgruppen zeigen eindrucksvoll, was mit Ausst?nden erreichbar ist, wenn sie nur einen empfindlichen Nerv der Bev?lkerung treffen und Mangel spürbar wird.     

School competition and students’ entrepreneurial intentions: international evidence using historical Catholic roots of private schooling

School choice research mostly focuses on academic outcomes. Policymakers increasingly view entrepreneurial traits as a non-cognitive outcome important for economic growth. We use international PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students’ entrepreneurial intentions, measured by their occupational desire to manage a small enterprise. We exploit Catholic-Church resistance to state schooling in the 19th century as a natural experiment to obtain exogenous variation in current private-school shares. Our instrumental-variable results suggest that a 10%-point higher private-school share raises students’ entrepreneurial intentions by 0.3–0.5% points (11–18% of the international mean) even after controlling for current Catholic shares, students’ academic skills, and parents’ entrepreneurial occupation.     

Luther and the Girls: Religious Denomination and the Female Education Gap in Nineteenth‐century Prussia*

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, thereby evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county‐ and town‐level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education. This result holds when using only the exogenous variation in Protestantism due to a county's or town's distance to Wittenberg, the birthplace of the Reformation. Similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871.