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Title: Three Essays in Public Economics
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: This thesis collects three papers on topics in public economics. In the first two chapters, I consider the relationships between political and economic effects at the US state-level. Chapters 2 and 3 both have ramifications for contemporary policy debates, and highlight features of tax and intellectual property systems which have been understudied. The first chapter examines the relationship between economic growth and the outcomes of US presidential elections. Contemporary US politics has been marked by substantial increases in political polarization and a decline in swing voting, which we might expect would reduce the effect of economic growth on election outcomes. Using a Bartik-type instrument and state-level and individual-level data, I find that the effect of state economic growth on incumbent vote share is smaller when state-level polarization or individual partisanship is stronger. I also show that swing voting and economic voting are closely linked. The second chapter studies how tax systems reflect different social preferences about taxing income groups. I apply the inverse-optimum income tax method to quantify these preferences by calculating the implied weights for every US state. To capture major features of state taxation, I extend the theory underlying the inverse-optimum method to include sales taxes, property taxes, and state income taxes. Using IRS data, I calculate effective tax rates for each state, and find the weights for both single and joint filers across incomes in every US state. I find that the weights vary substantially across states, and do not decrease monotonically as might be expected from most theories of social welfare. The third chapter examines the effect of a different public policy: Canada's protection of a specialized form of intellectual property, industrial designs (IDs). Estimating the effect of holding IDs with nearest-neighbour matching, I find a 19% total treatment effect in revenue for Canadian firms holding IDs. To determine the marginal effect of each additional ID held, a regression with fixed effects finds that a 1% increase in the stock of IDs increases revenue by 0.14%. This shows the importance of design protection in Canada's IP policy.
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Authors: Embree, Robert
Institution: University of Toronto
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Pages: 1-132
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Poverty and Welfare
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