ECON0024代写、代做C++，Python编程设计

日期：2024-08-07 08:55

ECON0024 TURN OVER

SUMMER TERM 2024

DEPARTMENTALLY MANAGED REMOTE ONLINE EXAMINATION

ECON0024: ECONOMIC POLICY ANALYSIS

Assessment Component: 75% Remote Online Controlled Condition Examination

Time Allowance: You have 3 hours to complete this examination, plus an additional collation

time of 20 minutes and an Upload Window of 20 minutes. The additional collation time has

been provided to cover any additional tasks that may be required when collating documents for

upload, and the Upload Window is for uploading and correcting any minor mistakes. The

additional collation time and Upload Window time allowance should not be used for additional

writing time.

If you have been granted SoRA extra time and/or rest breaks, your individual examination

duration and additional collation time will be extended pro-rata and you will also have the 20-

minute Upload Window added to your individual duration.

If you miss the submission deadline during the 40-minute Late Submission Period and do not

receive approved mitigation for the circumstances relating to your late submission, a Late

Submission Penalty will be applied by the Module Administrator. At the end of the Late

Submission Period, you will not be able to submit your work via Moodle and you will not be

permitted to submit work via email or any other channel.

All work must be submitted anonymously in a single PDF file. Do not write your name and

student number in either the file or the file name. The file name must be in the following

format: Module Code-%Exam i.e. ECON0024-75%Exam.

Page Limit: 10 pages.

Academic Misconduct: By submitting this assessment, you are confirming that you have not

violated UCL  s Assessment Regulations relating to Academic Misconduct contained in Section

9 of Chapter 6 of the Academic Manual.

Number of Questions Answered Policy: In cases where a student answers more questions

than requested by the examination rubric, the policy of the Economics Department is that the

student  s first set of answers up to the required number will be the ones that count (not the best

answers). All remaining answers will be ignored.

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ECON0024 CONTINUED

QUESTIONS

Answer FOUR questions from Part A, ONE question from Part B and ONE question from

Part C.

Questions in Part A carry 10 per cent of the total mark each, and questions in Parts B and

C carry 30 per cent of the total mark each.

PART A

Answer FOUR questions from this section.

A1. A small competitive economy produces two internationally traded outputs, wheat and

cloth, using two inputs, labour and capital, according to constant-returns-to-scale production

technologies. Output prices, fixed on world markets, are pA for wheat and pB for cloth. Input

prices are w for labour and r for capital. The two factors are free to move between sectors so

factor prices are the same in the two industries. Aggregate capital stock is fixed at K and

capital stocks employed in the two sectors are KA and KB. Aggregate labour force L is the

sum of native labour N and immigrant labour M, the two being equally productive and perfect

substitutes, and is split into LA and LB employed in the two sectors. Factor market

equilibrium involves

gA(KA/LA) = gB(KB/LB) = w/r

cA(w,r) = pA cB(w,r) = pB

LA+LB = N+M KA+KB = K

where gA and gB are the (absolute values of the) marginal rates of technical substitution

between the two inputs in the two sectors and cA and cB are unit cost functions in the two

sectors. Suppose production of cloth is more capital-intensive.

How does a small inflow of immigrant labour affect factor returns and factor use in the two

sectors?

Suppose the immigrant inflow is large enough that production shifts entirely to the wheat

sector. What happens to factor returns in this case?

A2. Answer all items.

a) Suppose a central bank targets an overnight interbank rate as its policy instrument.

The yield on a 10-year corporate bond is generally substantially higher. What are the

two main factors that determine the size of this wedge? Explain.

b) Suppose the 10-year government bond yield falls lower than the 1-year government

bond yield. What is this called? What may it indicate? Why?

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c) Describe two types of unconventional monetary policy.

A3. Are the following statements True, False or Uncertain? Explain each answer.

a) Health inequalities are only present in countries without universal health insurance.

b) In the context of the Grossman (1972) model, people demand medical care because

they enjoy going to the doctor.

c) Health spending as a share of GDP has declined in the United Kingdom since the

mid 1950s, which is the main reason underlying the worsening health of the

population.

A4. Are the following statements True, False or Uncertain? Explain each answer.

1) The main motivation for introducing minimum wage policies was always poverty reduction.

2) Minimum wages have an unambiguously negative effect on employment in the

neoclassical (perfectly competitive) framework. This highlights the idea that this policy can

do more harm than good.

3) The current state of the art evidence on the employment effects of the minimum wage

suggests that employment increases at lower levels of the minimum wage, but once the

minimum wage to median wage ratio goes above 45%, employment starts to decline.

A5. Financial Times, November 2022:   UK chancellor Hunt considers tax hit on dividends

 Hunt has asked officials to look at raising the dividend taxation rate  . Sir Keir Starmer, the

Labour leader, has said   Some people obviously earn their income through a wage, other

people earn it through stocks and shares and dividends and we are looking at what is a fair

way to tax all income wherever it comes from    

What arguments might be used by a government to tax interest income from saving accounts

differently from income from employment? How would your argument differ if the capital

income was from dividend payments rather than from interest on saving accounts?

A6. Choose two sources of labour market frictions in developing countries. Discuss their

potential effects on labour market outcomes, and which groups of workers are likely to be more

affected. Do so considering the evidence discussed in class, emphasizing at least one piece of

causal evidence available.

A7. Discuss the following statement: It is better to pay teachers based on an absolute measure

of performance than on a relative measure of performance that ranks a teacher against a set

of her peers. This is especially true when the measure of performance is value added.

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PART B

Answer ONE question from this section.

B1. Consider the following news item.

Over 20 percent of taxi drivers in Chicago are from South Asia, the highest figure for all

metro areas in the US.

There are also more doctors, engineers, scientists, accountants and economists driving

taxis in Chicago than in any other US city, with the exception of Washington DC, a survey

has found.

"These are highly qualified people but the qualifications are different," said Jack Nichols,

manager of Flash Cab Company that operates 560 cabs.

"If they are doctors back in Pakistan, they are not necessarily licensed to be a doctor here. If

they are an accountant (in their native country), accounting practices here are different."

Many immigrants turn to taxi driving when faced with difficulty in getting their degrees

recognised in the US, and in some cases because of the language barrier, said Richard Kaye,

a labour economist with the Illinois Department of Employment Security.

Among them is Vijay Kalhon, who has a master's degree from Delhi University.

He drives a cab owned by an Indian American but plans eventually to get teacher

certification.

"No one comes in and says, 'I am going to do this permanently," said [Mohammed Khan,

another Indian American cab driver], "but the freedom of being by yourself catches hold of

you."

Nichols of Flash Cab agreed. "Everybody gets into this as a temporary thing and most end up

staying."

Osman Chowdhury,   Over 20 percent of Chicago cab drivers from South Asia  ,

NRIinternet.com

a) Explain what features of the labour markets in the two countries you would expect to

encourage highly qualified South Asians to migrate to the United States.

b) Explain why South Asians arriving in the US labour market would not typically be

initially remunerated for their skills similarly to native-born Americans but why this

effect might diminish over time.

c) Suppose you want to estimate the rate at which South Asian immigrants assimilate to

the US labour market. Assume you have a single year  s cross-sectional labour survey

with data on South Asian-born and American-born workers in the Chicago labour

market covering earnings, age, other characteristics and (in the case of immigrants)

years since arrival in the country. Explain how you could estimate the rate of

assimilation, problems you would face and assumptions which you would need to make.

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d) Suppose that you are now given access to several years of this survey. How would this

change what you would do and the assumptions which you would need to make?

B2. Family Hubs are at the heart of the new policy of the British government for the Early

Years, led by Rt Hon Dame Andrea Leadsom DBE MP. They are baby-centred services,

designed to give every baby the best start for life, by integrating within them a host of services

to help parents and children. The Family Hubs Network states   Family Hubs provide the

opportunity for an enhanced role for health visitors. Their placement at the heart of

communities would expand current, community-based service provision and facilitate a greater

degree of integration of services to maximise efficiency and coordination of professionals and

voluntary sector providers. Hubs can also coordinate services currently delivered through The

Family Nurse Partnership programme. This will ensure that every new parent will come

through the door providing early access to public and community-based services and networks

for all, including those who are typically harder to reach. Where Family Nurse Partnerships are

based in Hubs they can draw on skills beyond their health visitor competency for example from

Jobcentre Plus to help young parents with a job search.  

a) The Universal Health Visiting Programme have faced repeated challenges in the last few

years. Briefly discuss the nature and content of this programme and the challenges it has

faced.

b) The results of the RCT evaluation of the Family Nurse Partnership (Robling et al., 2016)

have clearly shown the lack of effectiveness of the programme in improving maternal and

child outcomes. Discuss.

c) Discuss the challenges in conducting cost-benefits analyses of early interventions, with

particular reference to the programmes in (a) and (b).

B3. Answer all questions:

a) What are the key components in an analysis of the revenue generated from an increase

in the top rate of income tax?

b) Considering the taxation of incomes below the top tax bracket, how does a Mirrlees

optimal tax analysis differ from the choice of revenue maximising top rate in part (a)?

c) Under what circumstances can an optimal marginal income tax rate be negative? Give

a practical example of the importance of an optimal negative marginal tax rate.

B4. This question discusses the causes of firm informality, focusing only on the extensive

margin of informality. Consider a model where:

? Entrepreneurs are characterised by their productivity   ; they observe    when

choosing to operate in the formal or informal sectors.

? Formal firms pay revenue and payroll taxes, ty and tw respectively; they also pay a

per-period fixed cost of operation, cf .

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? The production function F (k, ?) is the same in both sectors, increasing and

concave in ? and k (labour and capital respectively).

? Informal firms face a "cost of informality" that is increasing and convex in firm  s

output: p(y(  )).

? Wages and cost of capital are different across sectors.

Answer the following questions:

a) With the above set up in mind, write the profit functions in the formal and

informal sectors and characterise the decision to be formal.

b) Explain the intuition behind the different costs and benefits of formality/informality

that are captured in these profit functions.

c) Given this framework, discuss the potential policy interventions available to

policy makers.

d) Write the regression that one could use to estimate the effect of these different

policies on firm formalization. Discuss the potential problems to get at causal

estimates and how the literature has addressed these challenges.

PART C

Answer ONE question from this section.

C1. For this question, consider a bivariate SVAR in = ? ?, with three lags,

= 1?1 + 2?2 + 3?3 + ,

where are the structural shocks. Assume a   named shock   normalisation; that is, the first

shock is the monetary policy shock.

a) What parameter measures the contemporaneous impact (0-horizon IRF) of inflation to

a monetary policy shock?

b) Write out the formula for the impulse response of to the monetary policy shock at

the third horizon. Show your working and all terms explicitly.

c) Suppose an analyst suggested identifying the monetary policy shock in this model

using a recursive/Cholesky scheme. What restriction does this impose on the model?

Answer both mathematically and in words. What does this imply about how monetary

policy reacts to economic conditions?

d) This may seem like an unrealistic assumption, but why might it be a fair description

of how a central bank sets interest rates?

e) Suppose you intended to estimate the SVAR in the question using data from the

United States. Do you think the bivariate model is misspecified?

f) Describe an approach to identifying the monetary policy shock in a SVAR other than

recursive identification.

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C2. Imagine you work at the Congressional Budget Office, and you are asked to evaluate the

impact of raising the federal minimum wage to $15.

1) Suppose you have access to county level wage and employment data from the restaurant

sector from the last 30 years. Your supervisor suggests that you should analyse past state-level

minimum wages by exploiting a border discontinuity design. Can you explain how you would

implement this method?

2) How is this method related to the seminal paper of Card and Kruger (1994), which studies

the 1992 increase in Minimum Wages in New Jersey?

3) Besides documenting the impact of the policy, your boss also asked you to study the impact

of the policy before and after the policy change. Can you explain how to do that (write down

the regression equation estimating it)? What could we potentially learn from this exercise?

4) Your supervisor highlights that someone could also rely on state-level variation and estimate

the impact of the minimum using a standard TWFE estimation technique. Can you explain the

differences between this and the border discontinuity design?

5) Once you implement a proper literature review, you recognize that Dube, Lester, Reich

(2010) had implemented the TWFE and the border discontinuity approach examining state-

level variation in the minimum wages in the USA. Please explain their findings on employment

and wages. Which one leads to more credible estimates if you look at the before and after

changes in employment?

C3. Imagine a setting where a single student is taught by a single teacher. The human capital

of the student, h, is a function of M types of teacher effort, 1  : ? =    =1 + , where

1    are the productivity of each type of effort, and e is a shock which is mean zero and

independent of teacher effort. The teacher  s effort is costly, and the cost function is:

(1    ) =    12 ()2=1 .

a) Suppose there is a social planner with the following social welfare function, which

depends on student human capital and teacher effort: = (?) ? (1 ? )(1    ) where

is a constant, and (?) is the expected value of h. The social planner chooses 1   in order

to maximize . What are the optimum choices of 1  ? How do they depend on and

1    ? Discuss.

b) Suppose now the social planner cannot observe 1  , nor ?. Instead, the planner only

observes the performance of the student in exams: 1   . Assume that = + ,

= 1    , where 1    are constants, and 1    are mean zero random variables

independent of teacher effort. The planner can offer teachers compensation contracts of the

following form: = +    =1 , where X is total teacher compensation, s is a base salary,

and 1    are performance bonuses. The planner chooses s, 1    , to maximize welfare.

Teachers choose 1   in order to maximize their expected utility, which is equal to expected

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ECON0024 END OF PAPER

total compensation net of cost: () ? (1    ). In addition, their expected utility needs to

exceed the utility on their outside option, 0, otherwise they do not become teachers. Solve the

problem of the planner. What are the optimum choices of 1    ? How do they differ from

the answer in a)? Discuss.

c) Suppose now that the planner is further constrained in the compensation contracts she

can write, and is required to pay the same bonus for all tests: = , = 1   . How is this

different from paying a bonus based on the average test? What are the optimum choices of

1    in this case? How do they differ from the answers in a) and b)? What happens if =

, = 1   , and = , = 1   ? Discuss.

d) Go back to b), but consider now the more complex case where =    =1 + ,

= 1    , where 1    are constants, and 1    are mean zero random variables

independent of teacher effort. Describe how you would work out the answer to b) in this case

(you do not need to present the full solution to the problem). Discuss.