A big congratulations to Adriana Lleras-Muney, who recently received an R21 grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to study the health impacts of long-run exposure to pollution using evidence from military personnel. The R21 grant mechanism is intended to encourage exploratory and developmental research by providing support for the early and conceptual stages of project development. A summary of her research can be found below.
Summary: A large body of observational studies link long-term pollution exposure to health harms, most notably mortality from cardiovascular disease and lung cancer. However these studies have some limitations. One factor that has not been studied much is the potential for confounding due to people’s ability to choose where they live. Indeed previous work finds that people with more information and greater resources are more likely to move to locations with lower pollution. This raises the question of whether poor health is caused by long-term exposure to pollution or by other factors correlated withpollution. In this project, we aim to address these issues of residential confounding by focusing on military personnel. Military personnel are an ideal group for this purpose because they are constrained in their ability to choose residential locations to avoid pollution—their moves are determined by the needs of the Army. Therefore, pollution exposures for this group are likely to be independent from the multitude of other factors that affect health. Moreover, military personnel have uniform access to health care, such that the outcomes we study are unlikely to reflect access to care or ability to pay, but instead reflect underlying demand for medical care due to disease. Additionally, rich administrative data enables us to track the location and health care usage of personnel over long periods of time.
The Department of Economics congratulates Simon Board, the Benjamin Graham Centennial Professor in Value Investing, on being named a Fellow of the Econometric Society The Econometric Society is one of the most prestigious learned society in the field of economics, with a world-wide membership. Its main object is to promote studies that aim at a unification of the theoretical and empirical approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences. It operates as a purely scientific organization, without any political, social, financial or nationalistic allegiance or bias. The society is run by the Fellows who choose the constitution and elect the leadership. In turn, the leadership runs the journals of the society (Econometrica, Theoretical Economics, Quantitative Economics), and a series of conferences around the world. There are currently around 700 Fellows across the globe.
Professor Board is a microeconomic theorist who studies information economics, with applications to auction design, industrial organization, and labor economics. His recent research includes the spread of information on social networks, the design of dynamic pricing algorithms, and the role of reputation in incentivizing investment.
Professor Giorcelli received this award because of her contribution to the field of Economic History and Innovation. Her work uses historical policy events and unique historical data to look at the development and diffusion of management and technology innovations and their impact on firm productivity. In particular, she takes advantage of these unique data to convincingly identify and illustrate causes and effects of how innovations emerge, persist and is diffused across countries.
The Excellence Awards were created to promote young talent and are open to researchers and academics up to 35 years of age. Each laureate will be awarded a Research Fellowship at the Kiel Institute funded through separate scholarship programs. The aim of the Kiel Institute’s Excellence Awards in Global Economic Affairs is to build an international community of young economic researchers. The Excellence Awards have been presented annually since 2007.
The rise in income and wealth inequality has spurred a renewed interest in progressive wealth taxation. However, experts have disputed whether rich countries like the U.S, could realistically enforce a wealth tax. The matter is even more critical in developing countries, where a happy few own most of the wealth while governments have a weak capacity to enforce taxes.
In “Enforcing Wealth Taxes in the Developing World: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Colombia,” Professor Juliana Londoño-Vélez and her co-author Javier Avila-Mahecha fill this gap by leveraging quasi-experimental variation and data on personal wealth, offshoring, and tax evasion from Colombians’ tax returns and a government-designed program for disclosures of hidden wealth. To shed additional light on offshoring, the authors link the tax microdata with the leaked “Panama Papers,” which inform about Colombians offshoring to the country’s most relevant tax havens.
In the first part of the study, the authors estimate the prevalence, distribution, and nature of wealth tax evasion:
How big of a problem is tax evasion? There is substantial evasion: Colombia’s disclosure program revealed hidden wealth worth 1.73% of GDP, an order of magnitude more than a similar scheme in the U.S. recovered. Moreover, Colombians are three times more likely to evade than Scandinavians, with two-fifths of the wealthiest 0.01% admitting to hiding wealth.
Who evades? Wealth tax evasion is remarkably skewed: the wealthiest 0.01% of the distribution is 55 times more likely to dodge taxes than the top 5% as a whole.
How do people evade? More than 80% of tax evasion is achieved by hiding assets offshore, especially in neighboring tax havens like Panama. In all, the wealthiest evaders hide one-third of their fortune offshore.
In the second part of the study, the authors explore how wealth tax evasion responds to policies aiming to strengthen enforcement. In the field of Public Economics, the canonical framework for tax evasion models the decision of whether and how much to evade as a function of (i) the tax incentives, (ii) the perceived threat of detection, and (iii) the penalty for misreporting. Guided by this framework, the study exploits a series of exogenously-timed events to isolate effects along each of these components on tax compliance.
Can tax incentives encourage compliance in the short- and medium-term? A difference-in-difference approach compares wealthy individuals who did versus did not disclose under Colombia’s scheme. Tax compliance is persistent: three years after their revelation, disclosers report 49.2% more wealth. Because they also reveal the return of those assets, they end up paying 39% more income taxes. Since exposed wealth tax evasion concentrates at the top, the policy raised revenue collected from the wealthiest 1%, raising effective progressivity.
Does evasion respond to a credible threat of detection? Halfway through the disclosure scheme, the Panama Papers news story broke, exposing tax evaders named in the leak to government scrutiny. A difference-in-difference approach exploits the exogenous timing of this leak and compares wealth tax filers named or not in the leak before and after it occurred. The Panama Papers spooked Colombia’s elite to own up about their wealth: the leak caused a sixfold increase in the likelihood of disclosing any hidden wealth. Consistent with offshore tax evasion, disclosures of foreign assets increased by an even larger amount. Consequently, taxes paid by people named in the leak more than doubled.
Can evasion respond to the threat of jail? There is suggestive evidence that evasion responds to tougher sanctions, with a significant spike in disclosures six months after Colombia criminalized tax evasion for the first time in its history.
These results help reconcile the views of the wealth tax skeptics and enthusiasts regarding the feasibility of taxing wealth in a globalized world. On the one hand, offshore evasion is a serious threat to progressive wealth taxation, especially when the enforcement environment is weak. But, on the other hand, strengthening the enforcement regime can credibly improve wealth tax compliance, raise taxes from the wealthiest individuals, and safeguard the feasibility of progressive wealth taxation.
FOUNDER AND SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR OF VERITYPOINT
Sam is a founder and Senior Managing Director of VerityPoint. Since 1994, Sam has worked with several of the nation’s largest corporations and institutions to develop and implement executive and employee benefit plans that are most effective and efficient. He has worked with clients in a broad range of industries and is dedicated to helping them solve their unique benefit related challenges.
Sam’s expertise includes all aspects of nonqualified plans (including Deferred Compensation Plans, Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans, Rabbi Trusts and specialized state-of-the-art nonqualified plans), as well as other broad-based employee benefit plans. He is a frequent speaker on these topics, having spoken at World at Work, The Conference Board and other industry events.
Sam shares a strong commitment to the community and currently serves as a Board member and member of the Executive Committee for Junior Achievement of Southern California, and as a Board member for the Torrance Memorial Hospital Foundation. He has also previously served on UCLA’s Alumni Association Board and the UCLA Foundation’s Board of Governors. Sam is also an active member of several other industry and community-based organizations.
Sam graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Business and Economics in 1989.
Recently, a book was published recounting the history of the UCLA Economics Department. This book, written by David R. Henderson and Steven Globerman, discusses some of the most important economists at UCLA during the 1970s: Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, Sam Peltzman, Benjamin Klein, Robert Clower, Axel Leijonhufvud, Jack Hirshleifer, William Allen, and George Hilton. To learn more about the book, visit this site here.
In this op-ed published in Dawn, Natalie Bau and Jishnu Das measure learning in Pakistani schools and provide new evidence that learning is fragile, with children forgetting much of what they know from year to year.
On July 1st, Simon Board took over as lead Editor of Theoretical Economics after spending four years as Co-Editor. Theoretical Economics is the leading journal in economic theory. It is open access and is a journal of the Econometric Society.
Congratulations to Martin Hackmann, the winner of the Warren C. Scoville Distinguished Teaching Award for best undergraduate teaching in Spring 2021! Martin Hackmann won this award while teaching ECON 131: Economics of Health and Healthcare. This course provides an economic analysis of health and healthcare. It includes presentations of several detailed economic models, including models of addiction, demand for healthcare, demand for insurance, nonprofit behavior, and other models.
Warren C. Scoville was a faculty member for the UCLA Department of Economics for 28 years before his death in 1969. This award is given quarterly in his name to the ladder faculty member who receives the highest teaching evaluation scores from his or her course.
