Showing results 1 - 10 of 49
| Alberto Alesina
July 2020, Paper: "The Online Appendix provides additional evidence and sensitivity checks. Section A shows the distribution of schooling by country-birth-decade. Section B details the sample construction process. In Section C we report validation checks of the IPUMS data on education with alternative cross-country and regional statistics. We also explore the relationship between educational attainment and various proxies of well-being across…
| Alberto Alesina
January 2020, Paper, "This paper provides a simple conceptual framework that captures how different perceptions, attitudes, and biases about immigrants or minorities can shape preferences for redistribution. Through the lens of this framework, we review the empirical literature on the effects of racial diversity and immigration on support for redistribution in the US and Europe."
Non-HKS Author Website -…
| Alberto Alesina
Effects of Austerity: Expenditure- and Tax-based Approaches. Alberto Alesina, Spring 2019, Paper, "Sometimes governments need to reduce their budget deficits aggressively. These policies are labeled “austerity.” Almost always austerity is needed because excessive debt has been accumulated, as a result of policy mistakes and political distortions (Alesina and Passalacqua 2016; Yared, in this issue). The austerity policies embraced by several…
| Alberto Alesina
Immigration and Preferences for Redistribution in Europe. Alberto Alesina, February 2019, Paper, "We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native respondents display lower support for redistribution when…
| Alberto Alesina
Misperceptions about immigration and support for redistribution. Alberto Alesina, July 31, 2018, Paper, "The debate on immigration is often based on misperceptions about the number and character of immigrants. The column uses data from surveys in six countries to show that such misperceptions are striking and widespread. The column also describes how an experiment in which people were encouraged think about their perception of immigrants made…
| Alberto Alesina
Immigration and Redistribution. Alberto Alesina, June 2018, Paper, "We design and conduct large-scale surveys and experiments in six countries to investigate how natives' perceptions of immigrants influence their preferences for redistribution. We find strikingly large biases in natives' perceptions of the number and characteristics of immigrants: in all countries, respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants…
| Alberto Alesina
Climbing out of Debt. Alberto Alesina, March 2018, Paper, "Almost a decade after the onset of the global financial crisis, national debt in advanced economies remains near its highest level since World War II, averaging 104 percent of GDP. In Japan, the ratio is 240 percent and in Greece almost 185 percent. In Italy and Portugal, debt exceeds 120 percent of GDP." …
| Alberto Alesina
Is it the ''How'' or the ''When'' that Matters in Fiscal Adjustments? Alberto Alesina, March 2018, Paper, "Using data from 16 OECD countries from 1981 to 2014 we study the effects on output of fiscal adjustments as a function of the composition of the adjustment--that is, whether the adjustment is mostly based on spending cuts or on tax hikes--and of the state of the business cycle when the adjustment is implemented. We find that both the ''how…
| Alberto Alesina
What do we know about the effects of Austerity? Alberto Alesina, January 2018, Paper, "This paper summarizes the results of a large recent literature on multi year fiscal plans for deficit reduction (austerity). The key results are that deficit reduction policies based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of short run output losses than tax based adjustments. On average fiscal adjustment based upon spending cuts have very small…
| Alberto Alesina
The Effects of Fiscal Consolidations: Theory and Evidence. Alberto Alesina, May 2017, Paper, "We investigate the macroeconomic effects of fiscal consolidations based upon government spending cuts, transfers cuts and tax hikes. We extend a narrative dataset of fiscal consolidations, finding details on over 3500 measures. Government spending and transfer cuts reduce output by less than tax hikes. Standard New Keynesian models match our results…