The ten weeks of my internship flew by much faster than expected! Just a few days after my last day of work, I moved to the US for the start of my second year of graduate school. Now that I’ve settled into my new home, I’ve finally had the chance to reflect on my experiences this summer. After a year of rigorous training in economic theory, it was wonderful to spend the last few months applying what I’ve learned in the classroom to two fascinating research projects. I am incredibly grateful to the Women and Public Policy Program for supporting my research position at EPoD.
I ended up splitting my time between helping to lay the groundwork for an impact evaluation of the Samurdhi housing lottery and performing data analysis for a survey experiment in Indonesia that explored whether priming tax office employees to think about tax fairness changed their approach to tax enforcement. While the Indonesia project was closely tied to my interest in public finance, my work on the Samurdhi housing lottery sparked a new interest in housing policy. It was also fascinating to see how both projects incorporated a gender lens.
My primary contribution to the Indonesia tax survey experiment involved estimating the impact of tax officers’ beliefs about the fairness of tax burdens on their tax enforcement behavior in hypothetical scenarios. In subsequent analysis, the research team will match survey responses to anonymized tax administrative data on tax officer monitoring and compliance activities in order to investigate tax officers’ enforcement behavior in the real world. An important component of this study is to understand how tax officer characteristics, notably gender, mediate the role of tax officers’ revenue targets and their beliefs about tax equity in de facto tax enforcement. There is little research on the relationship between tax officers’ beliefs/characteristics and their efforts towards tax enforcement, and I look forward to reading the final conclusions from the study.
In addition to the data analysis I did for the Samurdhi housing lottery project, I had the chance to explore the literature on housing assistance programs implemented all over the world, with a special focus on outcomes for female beneficiaries. As I discussed in an earlier post, the response of female labor supply to housing assistance appears to vary depending on the specific features of the housing program. Most strikingly, two studies of the same public housing construction program in South Africa found that the effect on women’s labor supply greatly depends on how far the new housing projects were located from their previous place of residence. Women who moved to improved housing located close to their previous homes gained access to electricity, running water, and time-saving home appliances and were able to spend more time working as they needed less time for household chores. Those who originally lived far away, could not enjoy the full benefits of these improved amenities because the long and sometimes dangerous commute to work compelled them to reduce their hours worked. Other work has shown that means-tested housing vouchers can disproportionately suppress the labor supply of women. Means-testing raises the marginal tax rates for beneficiaries, as each additional dollar earned reduces the amount of rent covered by the housing voucher. Evidence suggests that households respond to the higher marginal tax rate by reducing total labor supply, and reductions tend to be larger for female household heads, perhaps due to the influence of the male breadwinner norm. Working on the Samurdhi project has made me realize how important it is to think about gender-specific treatment effects when designing and evaluating housing policies.
With classes resuming, I will soon be thinking of project ideas for my term papers. I’m excited to build on the work I’ve done this summer, and look forward to potentially developing my own project on housing security and female labor force participation in India.