We will now meet, as usual, in ** CGIS Knafel, room K354 **
On Sep 16, 2019, at 8:39 PM, Georgina Evans
<georginaevans(a)g.harvard.edu> wrote:
Dear Workshop Community,
Our next meeting will be Wednesday September 18, where Benjamin Lauderdale will present
work on "Measuring Attitudes towards Public Spending using a Multivariate Tax Summary
Experiment”.
Abstract: It is difficult to measure public views on tradeoffs between spending
priorities because public understanding of existing government spending is limited and the
budgetary problem is complicated. We present a new measurement strategy using UK
taxpayer summaries as the baseline for a continuous treatment, multivariate choice
experiment. The experiment proposes deficit neutral bundles of changes in spending and
taxation, allowing us to investigate attitudes towards modifications to the existing
budget. We then use a structural choice model to estimate public preferences over 13
spending categories and the taxation level, on average and as a function of respondent
attributes. We find that the UK public favours paying more in tax to finance large
spending increases across major budget categories; that spending preferences are
multidimensional; and that younger people prefer lower levels of taxation and spending
than older people. Finally, we report a pre-registered out-of-sample validation of the
estimates from the experiment.
Where: CGIS South S001 Kin-Chung Lam Room **** Please note the one-off change of
location ****
When: Wednesday, September 18th at 12 noon - 1:30 pm.
All are welcome! Lunch will be provided.
Best,
Georgie
(Note: the Fall schedule for Gov 3009 can be viewed here
<https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009>)