I apply the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) framework (Hendren & Sprung-Keyser, 2020) to Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs targeting education in a subset of developing countries from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.

CCTs are an integral arm of government spending programs aiming to reduce inequality through increased access to education, and while they form a small percentage of the overall education budget within the countries in my sample, the efficiency of these programs can be impacted by several things.

As the first step of my analysis, I use the MVPF framework as a comparable metric to determine the long-run impacts of government investments in education via CCTs and calculate the overall welfare effect of these programs. Once I determine the MVPF of the programs included in my database, I will conduct a cross-country comparison of the efficiency of these programs across several dimensions such as: redistributive impact of fiscal interventions; budgeted education spending; compulsory schooling laws; child labor laws; and consumption taxes. This research will contribute to the overall debate on the efficiency and efficacy of CCT programs targeting education and can inform future fiscal policy initiatives focused on public expenditures in education.

Size-based polices, whereby firms smaller than a given size threshold are not required to remit taxes or comply with regulations, are ubiquitous, especially in developing economies. These policies distort firms size choices, incentivizing them to remain small.

In this paper, we explore the dynamic implications of two size-based tax policies from Pakistan. Under the first policy, firms with profits below the income tax exemption threshold are not required to pay profit tax and under the second policy firms with annual turnover below the VAT exemption threshold are not required to remit VAT on their sales.

Exploiting the universe of income tax returns filed between 2006 and 2020 and leveraging important tax reforms through which these exemption thresholds were moved more than once, we document six stylized facts on how these size-based policies affect firm behavior:

(1) both thresholds induce strong behavioral responses with strong bunching of firms observed in both profit and turnover distributions;

(2) compared to the income tax threshold, bunching at the VAT threshold is far more spread and diffused;

(3) there is strong stickiness in outcomes close to the threshold with bunching firms continue to bunch for many years;

(4) dynamic analyses of profit and turnover growths shows that distortions created by the two size-based polices are much more widespread than captured by the static bunching framework;

(5) there is strong interaction between the two policies with the reaction to movement in the VAT threshold not materializing unless the income tax exemption threshold is also moved;

(6) there are strong negative spillovers produced by the polices as even firms not subject to the threshold also bunch.

Using bunching and difference-in-differences frameworks, we estimate the reduced-form effects of the two policies, exploiting the movements of the two thresholds. We then use the simulated method of moments to estimate a dynamic structural model incorporating non-linear taxation of firms observed in Pakistan. The model rationalizes our results and allows counterfactual policy analysis.

Income inequality has been rising steadily almost everywhere since the 1980s. Recent estimates suggest that globally the share of national income accruing to the bottom 50% has shrunk to less than 10%, whereas the share accruing to the richest 10% has grown closer to 60% (Chancel et al., 2022). How economies distribute the income they generate depends on the social preferences of their citizens, but high levels of inequality can hamper economic growth, thus limiting the resources available for redistribution. The rich, for example, may acquire disproportionate influence over markets and politics, leading to policies that perpetuate their wealth and power at the expense of broader economic health (Piketty et al., 2014).

Alternatively, inequitable distribution of income or wealth may weaken the social compact, resulting in lower trust in the government, political instability, and even conflict. Governments use taxes, transfers, and public spending to reduce inequality and achieve an income distribution they perceive as fair. There is, however, limited evidence on how effective these policies are in achieving these objectives, especially in a developing country setting. This paper aims to address this gap in literature.

We assemble a novel dataset combining (i) a nationally-representative survey of house- hold incomes; (ii) tax returns of both income and consumption taxes; and (iii) spending on the provision of public goods by federal and provincial governments. We us the dataset to:

1. Document the long-run trends on income inequality in Pakistan. Specifically, we show the share of national income accruing to the top 0.01%, 0.1%, 1% and 10% of population between 2006 and 2020. We also show the evolution of Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient during these years. We explore spatial distribution of national income, il- lustrating how it is distributed among more than 200 districts of the country.

2. Explore how two main taxes—income tax and VAT—impact inequality. Leveraging income tax data, we estimate the effective tax rates across various income groups. This analysis allows us to assess the degree of tax progressivity and its impact on income inequality. We supplement this analysis by comparing the pre- and post-tax versions of the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient. Federal income tax in the country is designed as a progressive tax system with statutory tax rates rising with income. It is therefore likely to reduce inequality. The role of the VAT on the other hand is unclear. Depending upon the structure of exemptions, concessions, and informality, it could be a progressive, regressive, or neutral tax (Bachas et al., 2020). Thus, examining the two taxes together one can decide how redistributive the tax system is on the whole.

3. Examine the impact of government transfers (BISP) and public expenditure on income inequality. This data is available at the district level and accordingly we compare pre- and post-transfer distributions of income at the district level to see how much inequality the transfer and public expenditure programs mitigate. There is some suggestion in literature that even if a country’s tax system is not progressive, there could be some re- distribution through the public expenditure system whereby the government spends more money on average on impoverished neighborhoods. Drawing on public spending data for key areas such as education, health, and social protection, we evaluate the beneficiaries of such spending and how it contributes to reducing inequality.

4. See how tax evasion alters the effects of taxation on inequality. If the rich are able to evade more on average than the others, the tax system will lose some of its progressivity. We use data from random tax audits to estimate evasion rates across the distribution and by comparing the pre- and post-evasion distributions can estimate average effective tax rates across the population, thus evaluating the extent to which tax evasion reduces or increases inequality.

In this paper we investigate the impact of adolescent depression on adult life education attainment and employment outcomes using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 97 (NLSY97). We look at a subset of the data on siblings only and utilize the answers to questions on depressive symptoms that were collected during interview survey waves 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2015. Despite some obvious limitations, our paper offers several new contributions.

First, we provide evidence on the impact of depression on educational attainment and labor market outcomes whereas previous studies have looked at ADHD specifically or/and mental health broadly. Secondly, because several things can impact mental health, we base our investigation on children who started having depressive symptoms before the age of 18 and use sibling fixed effects to capture any household/family differences. Lastly, we look at a whole host of outcomes including test scores, highest degree attained, and income.

Our results show that if the frequency with which an individual feel depressed decreases, it leads to a fall in total GPA by 0.305/4.0 point. The coefficient of the interaction of depression and number of siblings is significant at 5% and positive, suggesting that the impacts of depression on total GPA are positive with a larger number of siblings. The impact of depression and its interaction with number of siblings on math GPA is like that of total GPA but the impacts are larger in magnitude. For annual individual income and highest education level in 2015 as outcomes, mental problems and depression have negative and insignificant impacts while their interactions with number of siblings affect income positively and insignificantly.

The FBR, in addition to the standard corporate tax rate on profits, levied a minimum tax on total revenue in TY2009 and introduced an Alternate Corporate Tax (ACT) on book income in TY2014, creating unique cut-offs in the tax schedule incentivizing firms to evade taxes through misreporting because firms had to pay the higher of these three taxes.

Using a rich data set of corporate tax returns for the entire universe of corporate tax filers in Pakistan, from TY 2008-2020, I will extend Best et al.'s (2015) static bunching approach to a dynamic bunching process (Marx, 2018) to determine what behavioral patterns emerged from a persistent notch and how they impacted reported revenue and book income.

I will attempt to answer whether measures seeking to demotivate sexual harassment behavior at the workplace backfire yielding negative impacts on women’s employment outcomes including employment rates and the gender pay gap.

It makes intuitive sense to assume that anti-sexual harassment trainings at the workplace will cause such incidents to reduce by raising more awareness of what constitutes proper workplace behavior.

Ideally, the trainings should have a positive impact encouraging more women to join the workforce. Additionally, it is also important to note that these training mandates come at a cost to the employer, and it wouldn’t be too farfetched to assume that this increase in cost might impact women’s earnings potential at the workplace.Throughthispaper,Iaimtofillinsomeofthesegapsidentified within the literature on the economic impact of sexual harassment against women at the workplace.