David Altig, Fed Atlanta: The growing case for a jobless recovery. Companies across the US economy are holding off on hiring even as the profit outlook improves, amid economic uncertainty and their own success at raising productivity in rough waters.
Claudia R. Sahm, Matthew D. Shapiro, Joel B. Slemrod, Sahm, Slemrod, NBER: Household Response to the 2008 Tax Rebate: Survey Evidence and Aggregate Implications. Only about one-fifth of respondents in the Reuters/University of Michigan survey report that the US 2008 tax rebates led them to mostly increase spending, while over half said it would lead them to mostly pay off debt. The results imply that the rebates provided only a modest stimulus to spending per dollar of rebate.
Kristie M. Engemann, Howard J. Wall, Fed St Louis: The Effects of Recessions Across Demographic Groups. The burdens of a recession are not spread evenly across demographic groups. Men accounted for more than three quarters of net job losses. The employment of single people fell at more than twice the rate that it did for married people, while black employment fell at one-and-a-half times the rate that white employment did. The employment change during the recession has been greatest for those without a high school diploma.
A.B Atkinson, University of York: Economics as a Moral Science. Inaugural Joseph Rowntree Foundation Lecture. Economy should be thought of as a moral science. One way of representing this is to say that market employment is a “merit good”. The employment target may therefore be rationalised in terms of social integration, to reduce social exclusion.
Howard Lempel et al, Brookings: Economic Cost and Health Care Workforce Effects of School Closures in the U.S. Closing schools in the United States for four weeks would reduce U.S. GDP by between $10 and $47 billion dollars, a cost equivalent to 0.1% to 0.3% of 2008 U.S. GDP. In addition, such a policy could lead to the absence of 6-19% of relevant healthcare personnel just when these workers are most needed, when incidence is high. Multiplier effect brought about by a multi-billion dollar decline in economic outpup can be substantially larger. These estimates have to be compared with the epidemiological benefits of school closure.
Mathias Trabandt, Harald Uhlig, NBER: How Far Are We From The Slippery Slope? The Laffer Curve Revisited. We analyze the Laffer curves for labor taxation and capital income taxation quantitatively for the US, the EU-14 and individual European countries by comparing the balanced growth paths of a neoclassical growth model. US can increase tax revenues by 30% by raising labor taxes and 6% by raising capital income taxes. For the EU-14 we obtain 8% and 1%. Denmark and Sweden are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve for capital income taxation.
Hans de Zwart, NL: The European Human Capital Index: Why I Should Move to Sweden and avoid Italy
Lee E. Ohanian, VoxEU: Herbert Hoover and the start of the Great Depression. What started the Great Depression? The industrial decline began before monetary contraction or banking panics – the conventional culprits – took hold. Ohanian attributes the massive drop in manufacturing hours to President Hoover’s labour policies, which kept nominal and real wages high.
Roland G. Fryer, Jr, Steven D. Levitt, NBER: An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mathematics. Girls in the US do appear to lag behind boys in math, at least in the early years of schooling. Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort show that upon entering kindergarten, the girls have about the same math ability as the boys. But by fifth grade, the girls are, on average, two and a half months behind. F/L explore a wide range of possible explanations in the U.S. data, including less investment by girls in math, low parental expectations, and biased tests, but find little support for any of these theories. Their attempts to find an answer in the data are, as they put it, a “failure.”
Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, Worldwatch Institute: Livestock and Climate Change. The environmental impact of the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases (GHGs),
Robert T. Hodgson, Journal of Wine Economics: An Analysis of the Concordance Among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions. An analysis of the number of wine Gold medals received in multiple competitions indicates that the probability of winning a Gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a Gold at another competition, indicating that winning a Gold medal is greatly influenced by chance alone.
Stephen Coate et al, Cornell University: Pet Overpopulation: An Economic Analysis. This paper develops a tractable dynamic model whose positive predictions square well with key features of the current U.S. market for pets. The model is used to understand, from a welfare economic perspective, the sense in which there is “overpopulation" of pets and the underlying causes of the problem. The paper also employs the model to consider what policies might be implemented to deal with the problem. A calibrated example is developed to illustrate these corrective policies and quantify the welfare gains they produce. A strategy is to work on the demand side taxing the sale of pure breed puppies or kittens.
No comments:
Post a Comment