Weekend reading: “lobbying and entrepreneurship” edition

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.

Equitable Growth round-up

Equitable Growth released a new working paper by Harvard University’s Daniel Carpenter and Brian Libgober that seeks to quantify the benefits of lobbying for businesses.

Liz Hipple digs into the implications of Carpenter and Libgober’s work: While most people focus on congressional lobbying, this research investigates the significant effects of lobbying during the rulemaking process.

New research shows that childhood exposure is critical to entrepreneurship and innovation. I examine why, in an era of rising inequality and economic segregation, this has profound effects on U.S. economic competitiveness.

New York University professor of law, Daniel Shaviro, reflects on Greg Leiserson’s presentation, “Removing the free lunch from dynamic scores: Reconciling the scoring perspective with the optimal tax perspective,” given at the law school’s Tax Policy Colloquium Series earlier this week (make sure to check out part two and three as well).

Links from around the web

Why is it so hard for Americans to get a decent wage? Jordan Weissman looks at a new study that finds that a lack of competition among employers gives businesses outside leverage over their employees, including the ability to keep workers’ pay low. [slate]

Margot Sanger-Katz details the way the Kentucky Medicaid program isn’t just creating work requirements but also implementing a series of administrative hurdles that will make it hard for many recipients to retain coverage. [the upshot]

Union membership in the United States remained at 10.7 percent in 2017, it is still far below what it was in the mid 20th century. Christopher Ingraham writes about reasons why unions could be further weakened in 2018, and why that is bad news for the entire U.S. workforce. [wonkblog]

Vanessa Fuhrmans writes about a major study by McKinsey & Co that finds companies with more diverse executive teams have march larger profit margins. [wsj]

The new tax law may reduce the growth of subsidized affordable housing by an estimated 235,000 units, writes Conor Dougherty, and will worsen already existing shortages. [nytimes]

Friday figure

From Equitable Growth’s “U.S. corporate tax cuts and wage growth.”

January 19, 2018

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