2000 Richard Blundell, Alan Duncan, and Costas Meghir "Estimating Labor Supply Responses Using Tax R скачать в хорошем качестве

2000 Richard Blundell, Alan Duncan, and Costas Meghir "Estimating Labor Supply Responses Using Tax R

Richard Blundell, Alan Duncan & Costas Meghir “Estimating Labor Supply Responses Using Tax Reforms” If taxes change, how much do people actually change how much they work? Labor supply elasticities are central to public finance. They determine the efficiency costs of taxation, the design of welfare systems, and the optimal balance between equity and incentives. Yet estimating them credibly is notoriously difficult. Wages and hours worked are jointly determined. Observed labor supply reflects both preferences and constraints. Simple regressions cannot disentangle income effects from substitution effects, nor can they isolate exogenous variation in tax incentives. Blundell, Duncan, and Meghir exploited a powerful source of identification: tax reforms that changed marginal incentives differently across demographic groups. These reforms generated variation in net wages and participation incentives that was plausibly independent of individual labor preferences. Embedding this variation within a structural labor supply framework, the authors estimated both intensive and extensive margin responses. Their findings highlighted the importance of participation elasticities, especially among secondary earners. The 2000 Frisch Medal recognized a major advance in empirical public economics. This paper elevated quasi-experimental tax variation into structural estimation and set a new standard for policy-relevant labor supply analysis. From this point forward, credible tax evaluation required both identification discipline and structural modeling.