Economist Channel

Thank you and happy new year to all my readers and commente...

Courtesy Greg Mankiw, the Joint Committee on Taxation distributional analysis of the new tax law.Bottom line: No change. Income categories are paying almost exactly the same share of federal taxes as before. Millionaires actually pay a tiny bit larger share in the new bill.Given...

Best sentence award:"It will not escape notice that New York buys subway construction the way all of America buys health care."-Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, covering an excellent New York Times article on why subway construction in New York is so insanely expensive.France -- supposedly bureaucratic, dirigiste, labor-protected France...

I ran across a video by my former Chicago Booth colleague Austan Goolsbee that prompts some reflection on the role of economists as public intellectuals. (In addition to my gentle scolding of Greg Mankiw in the last post.)Austan:"Hi, I'm an actual economist (MIT PhD degree shown) and...

Greg Mankiw wrote a New York Times column December 24 criticizing the university endowment tax. I disagree, not so much with the wisdom of the tax, but with the wisdom of writing such an article.The tax is small -- 1.4% of endowment income. So if $100 of endowment earns 10%, or $10 of income, the university pays 14 cents. Still, with $38 billion of...

See this link for the 2018 indicative call schedule for research funding of the main research funding body in Ireland. This includes calls for PhD studentships, postdoctoral fellowships, industry/policy collaborations, and principal investigator led research funding. I am happy to discuss collaboration or hosting in the broad areas of interest in our...

Steve Williamson has an interesting new post on corporate taxes and investment, in which he claims that taxing corporate profits has no effect on investment.What happens if the corporate tax rate goes up permanently, with the tax rate constant forever...? This has no effect on investment or on the firm's hiring decisions in any period. That is, if...

"Stepping on a Rake: the Fiscal Theory of Monetary Policy" is new paper, just published in the European Economic Review. This link gets you free access, but just for the next few days. After that, I can only post the last manuscript. (I held off sending this hoping the EER would fix the figure placement in the html version, but that didn't happen.)The...

Many commenters on the tax bill repeat the worry that companies will just use tax savings to pay dividends or buy back shares rather than make new investments.Savannah Guthrie, interviewing Paul Ryan on the Today Show, thought she had a real gotcha with "What they [CEOS] are planning...

Bigfoot's To-Do list Animatic from Lydia Fama on Vimeo.Vimeo channel, Youtube, website....

The High Cost of Good Intentions is a superb new book by my Hoover colleague John Cogan. It is a political and budgetary history of U.S. Federal entitlement programs. It is full of lessons for just why the programs have expanded inexorably over time, and just how hard it will...

See below and this website for details of the forthcoming IRC employment based PhD initiative. I would be very happy to speak to people interested in working with our group on a proposal, including current partners.BackgroundThe Employment-Based Postgraduate Programme is a unique national initiative. First piloted in 2012, it provides students in all...

Hoover has just announced the 2018 Summer Boot Camp August 19-25 2018The Hoover Institution’s Summer Policy Boot Camp (HISPBC) is an intensive, one week residential immersion program in the essentials of today’s national and international United States policy. The program is...

How can you cut taxes but raise (distorting, marginal) rates at the same time? Add a deduction, but phase it out with income. Then people below the income limits pay less taxes. But as the income limit  phases in, the marginal tax rate is higher than the previous rate. The new (and old) tax code is full of this perverse result.For example, suppose...

The recent tax bill discussion revealed many ways that universities benefit from lots of obscure tax subsidies like everyone else in contemporary America, and that they're pretty good at lobbying to keep them. Two issues stood out to me as worth comment.1) Taxing graduate school tuition waivers. This caused an uproar, even among economists and economics...

Just a brief note of thanks for all the interactions in the first year of our new programme in Dublin. Our twitter feed and hashtag #ucdbsp gives a sense of the activity over the year. We have now got a very solid research team in UCD. We also funded our first major projects...

The public and media discussion of "net neutrality" seems to have degenerated to "we want stuff for free." In the end, it does cost something to deliver internet, and the bandwith is limited.The (artfully named) "net neutrality" regulation was really a return to utility rate regulation,...