Behavioural Public Finance

This book tackles political, social, and behavioural aspects of public finance and fiscal exchange. The book combines conventional approaches toward public finance with new developments in economics such as political governance, social and individual aspects of economic behaviour. It colligates public finance and behavioural economics and gathers original contributions within the emerging field of behavioural public finance. The book addresses public finance topics by incorporating political, social, and behavioural aspects of economic decision-making, assuming the tax relationship is shaped by three dimensions of decision-making. Thus, it aims not only to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of public finance by bringing together scholars from various disciplines but also to examine public finance through the lens of political, social, and behavioural aspects. The book scrutinizes the relationship between political institutions, governance types, and public finance; it investigates the impact of social context, social capital, and societal cooperation on public finance; it explores behavioural biases of individual fiscal preferences. This book is of interest to scholars, policymakers, tax professionals, business professionals, financers, university students, and researchers in the fields of public policy and economics.

Recent developments in behavioural economics have deeply influenced the way governments design public policies. They give citizens access to online simulators to cope with tax and benefits systems and increasingly rely on nudges to guide individual decisions. The recent surge of interest in Behavioural Public Finance is grounded on the conviction that a better understanding of individual behaviours could improve predictions of tax revenue and help design better-suited incentives to save for retirement, search for a new job, go to school or seek medical attention. Through a presentation of the most recent developments in Behavioural Public Finance, this Element discusses the way Behavioural Economics has improved our understanding of fiscal policies.

Behavioral economics questions the basic underpinnings of economic theory, showing that people often do not act consistently in their own self-interest when making economic decisions. While these findings have important theoretical implications, they also provide a new lens for examining public policies, such as taxation, public spending, and the provision of adequate pensions. How can people be encouraged to save adequately for retirement when evidence shows that they tend to spend their money as soon as they can? Would closer monitoring of income tax returns lead to more honest taxpayers or a more distrustful, uncooperative citizenry? Behavioral Public Finance, edited by Edward McCaffery and Joel Slemrod, applies the principles of behavioral economics to government's role in constructing economic and social policies of these kinds and suggests that programs crafted with rational participants in mind may require redesign. Behavioral Public Finance looks at several facets of economic life and asks how behavioral research can increase public welfare. Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Jeff Strnad note that public support for a tax often depends not only on who bears its burdens, but also on how the tax is framed. For example, people tend to prefer corporate taxes over sales taxes, even though the cost of both is eventually extracted from the consumer. James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, and Andrew Metrick assess the impact of several different features of 401(k) plans on employee savings behavior. They find that when employees are automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan, they overwhelmingly accept the status quo and continue participating, while employees without automatic enrollment typically take over a year to join the saving plan. Behavioral Public Finance also looks at taxpayer compliance. While the classic economic model suggests that the low rate of IRS audits means far fewer people should voluntarily pay their taxes than actually do, John Cullis, Philip Jones, and Alan Lewis present new research showing that many people do not underreport their incomes even when the probability of getting caught is a mere one percent. Human beings are not always rational, utility-maximizing economic agents. Behavioral economics has shown how human behavior departs from the assumptions made by generations of economists. Now, Behavioral Public Finance brings the insights of behavioral economics to analysis of policies that affect us all.

Traditional public finance provides a powerful framework for policy analysis, but it relies on a model of human behavior that the new science of behavioral economics increasingly calls into question. In Policy and Choice economists William Congdon, Jeffrey Kling, and Sendhil Mullainathan argue that public finance not only can incorporate many lessons of behavioral economics but also can serve as a solid foundation from which to apply insights from psychology to questions of economic policy. The authors revisit the core questions of public finance, armed with a richer perspective on human behavior. They do not merely apply findings from psychology to specific economic problems; instead, they explore how psychological factors actually reshape core concepts in public finance such as moral hazard, deadweight loss, and incentives. Part one sets the stage for integrating behavioral economics into public finance by interpreting the evidence from psychology and developing a framework for applying it to questions in public finance. In part two, the authors apply that framework to specific topics in public finance, including social insurance, externalities and public goods, income support and redistribution, and taxation. In doing so, the authors build a unified analytical approach that encompasses both traditional policy levers, such as taxes and subsidies, and more psychologically informed instruments. The net result of this innovative approach is a fully behavioral public finance, an integration of psychology and the economics of the public sector that is explicit, systematic, rigorous, and realistic.

Standard models in economics and finance usually assume that people are rational, self-interested maximisers, effectively co-ordinated via the invisible hand of the price mechanism. Whilst these approaches produce tractable, simple models, they cannot fully capture the uncertainties and instabilities that affect everyday choices in today’s complex world. Insights from the other social and behavioural sciences can help to fill the gap and behavioural economics is the subject which brings economics and finance together with psychology, neuroscience and sociology. Behavioural Economics and Finance introduces the reader to some of the key concepts and insights from this rich, inter-disciplinary approach to real-world decision-making.

Behavioral Public Economics shows how standard public economics can be improved using insights from behavioral economics. Public economics typically lists four market failures that may justify government intervention in markets—imperfect competition (or natural monopoly), externalities, public goods, and asymmetric information. Under the rational choice paradigm (‘agents choose what is best for them’), public economics has examined the welfare effects of policy. Recent research in behavioral economics highlights a fifth market failure—individuals may make mistakes in pursuing their own well-being. This book calls for a rethinking of assumptions of individual behavior and provides a good foundation for public economic theory. Key features: Introduces behavioral perspectives into public economics. Explains why economic incentives often undermine social preferences. Reveals that social incentives matter for public policy. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and postgraduate students in public economics, behavioral economics, and public policy.

The second edition of Public Finance and Public Policy retains the first edition's themes of investigation of responsibilities and limitations of government. The present edition has been rewritten and restructured. Public choice and political economy concepts and political and bureaucratic principal-agent problems are introduced at the beginning for application to later topics. Fairness, envy, hyperbolic discounting, and other concepts of behavioral economics are integrated throughout. The consequences of asymmetric information and the tradeoff between efficiency and ex-post equality are recurring themes. Key themes investigated are markets and governments, institutions and governance, public goods, public finance for public goods, market corrections (externalities and paternalist public policies), voting, social justice, entitlements and equality of opportunity, choice of taxation, and the need for government. The purpose of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to the use of public finance and public policy to improve on market outcomes.

This report discusses the use and reach of behavioural insights, drawing on a comprehensive collection of over 100 applications across the world and policy sectors.