Gender Discriminatory Taxes, Fairness Perception, and Labor Supply

In this paper, we examine the gender specific impact of discriminatory taxation on fairness perception and individual labor supply decisions. Using the controlled environment of an experimental laboratory, we manipulate both distributional as well as procedural justice of taxation between subjects. We violate distributional fairness through the random application of tax rates, while procedural justice is broken by levying discriminatory tax rates based on taxpayer gender. For both inequality in outcome as well as discrimination, we find strong differences in reactions between male and female participants. Male participants perceived gender discriminatory taxation as unfair in and of itself. Female participants perceived random taxation as well as gender discriminatory taxation to be unfair, as long as they ended up with the higher tax rate. The perceived fairness strongly drove (did not affect) male (female) participants’ labor supply. Taken both subgroups together, while mere outcome inequality did not influence labor supply decisions significantly, we find evidence of a negative effect of gender-based discrimination on labor supply

Wellbeing and reproductive freedoms: assessing progress, setting agendas

Wellbeing, Rights and Reproduction Research Paper II

Globalization, Health Sector Reform, Gender and Reproductive Health

Explores the interrelationships between globalization and health sector reforms, and how changes in macro-economic and social policies affect women's reproductive health and rights

Assumptions of IV Methods for Observational Epidemiology

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are becoming increasingly popular as they seem to offer the only viable way to overcome the problem of unobserved confounding in observational studies. However, some attention has to be paid to the details, as not all such methods target the same causal parameters and some rely on more restrictive parametric assumptions than others. We therefore discuss and contrast the most common IV approaches with relevance to typical applications in observational epidemiology. Further, we illustrate and compare the asymptotic bias of these IV estimators when underlying assumptions are violated in a numerical study. One of our conclusions is that all IV methods encounter problems in the presence of effect modification by unobserved confounders. Since this can never be ruled out for sure, we recommend that practical applications of IV estimators be accompanied routinely by a sensitivity analysis.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS316 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Using the stated preference method for the calculation of social discount rate

The aim of this paper is to build the stated preference method into the social discount rate methodology. The first part of the paper presents the results of a survey about stated time preferences through pair-choice decision situations for various topics and time horizons. It is assumed that stated time preferences differ from calculated time preferences and that the extent of stated rates depends on the time period, and on how much respondents are financially and emotionally involved in the transactions. A significant question remains: how can the gap between the calculation and the results of surveys be resolved, and how can the real time preferences of individuals be interpreted using a social time preference rate. The second part of the paper estimates the social time preference rate for Hungary using the results of the survey, while paying special attention to the pure time preference component. The results suggest that the current method of calculation of the pure time preference rate does not reflect the real attitudes of individuals towards future generations

The ecology of race and punishment across cities

In an era of mass incarceration in the United States, neighborhood context plays a significant role in demographic patterns of imprisonment. This paper examines the preprison neighborhood environment of racial and ethnic groups within the Massachusetts prison admission population. The data include over 12,000 prison records of individuals sentenced to state prison for a criminal offense between 2009 and 2014. Findings indicate significant spatial variation across racial groups: The most disadvantaged preprison neighborhoods exist in small cities outside of Boston. Whites and Hispanics who enter prison from small cities, suburbs, and rural towns in Massachusetts lived in significantly more concentrated disadvantage than their counterparts in Boston. However, black men and women coming from Boston and small cities lived in the greatest concentrated disadvantage among the black admission population. Black‐ and Hispanic‐incarcerated people lived in significantly higher levels of concentrated disadvantage as compared to the average neighborhood of white‐incarcerated people. Results indicate that the prison population is drawn from a diverse set of communities, and suggest that an understanding of the full picture of differences in neighborhood context may play an important role in understanding community‐level conditions of mass incarceration and inform interventions aimed at ameliorating the community‐level impacts of imprisonment.Accepted manuscrip