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Vortrag – Leider abgesagt!

Marius Brülhart (Université de Lausanne):

Who Bears the Burden of Local Taxes?

We study the incidence of local taxes on the welfare of heterogeneous residents. A structural model of imperfectly mobile households who differ in terms of income and family status allows us to back out preferences for local public goods and mobility parameters that vary by family status. We calibrate the model with plausibly causal tax-base and housing-price elasticity estimates. Based on municipality-level data for Switzerland, we find that households with children have stronger preferences for locally provided public services and are less mobile than households without children. This in turn implies that the burden of local taxes is mainly borne – linearity of taxes and capitalization into lower housing notwithstanding – by above-median income households without children.

With Jayson Danton, Raphaël Parchet and Jörg Schläpfer.

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Vortrag

Melika Liporace (Università Bocconi):

4 Things Nobody tells you about Online News: A Model with Social Networks and Competition

Social media create a new type of incentives for news producers. Consumers share content, influence the visibility of articles and determine the advertisement revenues ensuing. I study the new incentives created by sharing and evaluate the potential quality of ad-funded online news. Producers rely on a subset of rational and unbiased consumers to spread news articles. The resulting news has low precision and ambiguous welfare effects. Producers’ incentive to invest in news quality increases with the private knowledge of the topic; hence, when information is most needed, the generated news tends to be of lesser quality. Competition does not necessarily improve news quality – it does so only if the sharing network is sufficiently dense. While ad-funded online news occasionally helps consumers take better decisions, it creates welfare mostly through entertainment. Some interventions, such as flagging wrong articles, substantially improve the outcome; other approaches, such as quality certification, do not.

Der Vortrag wird am Donnerstag, den 4. November 2021, von 12:00-13:30 s.t. stattfinden (Rempartstraße 16, Seminarraum 01012, 1.Stock). Zudem kann der Vortrag online besucht werden. Für die Zugangsdaten kontaktieren Sie gerne info@fww-ev.de.