Must- and Should-Reads: October 30, 2017
- Alan Auerbach: Five Questions for Congress on Tax Reform: “Congressional leaders say they’re working on a corporate tax reform…
- Will Wilkinson: Public Policy after Utopia: “That all our evidence about how social systems actually work comes from formerly or presently existing systems is a huge problem for anyone committed to a radically revisionary ideal of the morally best society…
- Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan: The DeLong-Shiller Redux: “2014, Robert Shiller and Brad DeLong…. [Shiller] claims if the value of this [CAPE] ratio is above 25, a major market drop is probably brewing…
- Kim Clausing: Would Cutting [U.S.] Corporate Taxes Raise Workers’ Incomes?: “Overall, it is difficult to document a relationship between lower corporate taxes and higher wages…
- Cosma Shalizi Review of Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J. P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe http://bactra.org/reviews/fools-gold/: “This is an extremely smart and well-written look at the growth and explosion of credit derivatives, as told through the story of Tett’s sources at J. P. Morgan…
- Equitable Growth: Research on Tap: Promoting equitable growth through tax reform: “Join us on November 6, 2017, for the second event in Equitable Growth’s new ‘Research on Tap”’ conversation series…
- Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Mi Luo: Wealth distribution and social mobility in the US: A quantitative approach: “We concentrate on… i) skewed and persistent distribution of earnings…
- Bridget Ansel and Heather Boushey: Modernizing U.S. Labor Standards for 21st-Century Families: “Women now make up almost half the U.S. workforce…
- Heather Boushey: Economics and feminism: “Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict…
- Alan Auerbach: Understanding the destination-based approach to business taxation: “The rising importance of multinational companies and the changing nature of production represents a challenge to the traditional ways that countries try to tax corporate profits…
- Paul Krugman: On Twitter: “Brad is right here: “Brad is right here…
- Jared Bernstein: When econ models potentially mislead, econ profs should say so: “Greg Mankiw points out the direction [but not the magnitude] of Hassett’s result is consistent with a particular economic model…
- Dani Rodrik: Growth Without Industrialization?: “FLow-income African countries can sustain moderate rates of productivity growth into the future, on the back of steady improvements in human capital and governance…
- Chye-Ching Huang: GOP Tax Framework Looks Much Like Kansas’ Failed Tax Cut Package: “In 2012, Kansas adopted an array of tax cuts that were large, costly, and heavily titled to those high on the income scale…
Links
- FT: Xi Jinping and China’s global ambitions: Under President Xi, who consolidated his power at this week’s Congress, China is showing a new confidence globally in its cultural, economic and diplomatic model. But how ‘soft’ is its ‘soft power’? Here’s the best of our comment and analysis…”
- Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero: Teacher diversity gaps hit close to home for nearly everyone
- David Schleicher: Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation
- Chris Patten: China’s New Emperor by Chris Patten – Project Syndicate: “From the stupefying antics of US President Donald Trump to the damaging rise of populist nationalism in Europe, democratic countries are experiencing their share of trials. But democratic systems have built-in stabilizing mechanisms…” <— not how it looks from China…
- Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, & Franklin Qian: The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco: “The substantial welfare losses due to decreased housing supply could be mitigated if insurance against large rent increases was provided as a form of government social insurance, instead of a regulated mandate on landlords…”
- Martin Sullivan: Corporate Tax Incidence Made Simple: “The bottom line of the JCT and CBO… one-quarter to one-fifth of the corporate tax burden is borne by labor…. Wade through the papers listed below. The second paper by Jane Gravelle is a two-page summary and an excellent place to start…” <– On the idiocy of Mankiw’s SOE 100% of tax incidence is on labor assumption…
- Annalee Newitz: Reprogramming: “It was like growing up in a science fiction novel. You were not allowed to change things…. The idea was that it would reduce conflict and be this beautiful community. Obviously it wasn’t. Growing up there was super weird…”
- Heather Boushey: That Greedy Upper-Middle Class: “Will the top 20 percent be willing to forego some of their advantages so that others may rise? Tough one…”
- Patrick Iber: The Party’s Over: Looking Back on Communism: “Lenin… was committed to smashing forms of bourgeois power, including representative democracy. Because Lenin… emerged victorious… [his] approach came to be taken as a prescriptive model rather than a strategic intervention at a particular moment…”
- INET: 2017 Edinburgh INET Program
- Cosma Shalizi: Homework 3: Past Performance, Future Results: “More practice with cross-validation and with smoothing; baby steps in using simulation to see how a model behaves and to do hypothesis testing; reinforcement that ‘the variable matters’ ̸= ‘the co- efficient on the variable is statistically significant’…”
- Carola Binder: Cowen and Sumner on Voters’ Hatred of Inflation: “I can still hardly imagine circumstances in which expansionary policy in a downturn would be the unpopular choice among voters themselves…”
- Diane Coyle: Economics for good: “Jean Tirole’s book Economics for the Common Good is out now… highly recommended…. I’ve… most appreciated Tirole’s ability to crystallise complicated issues in a straightforward way, combining surgical analysis with very clear explanation. This is too rare a skill among economists…”
- Lawrence Summers: The Business Roundtable’s outlandish tax cut claims: “I had low expectations, but the BRT methodology was even less serious than I expected. It appears that they have gone into the “fake fact” business…”
- Paul Krugman (2010): A Quotation Ruined By Context: “[Mill:] there is no opinion so absurd as not to have been maintained by some person of reputation…” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mill-john-stuart/1844/currency.htm
- David Glasner: The Standard Narrative on the History of Macroeconomics: An Exercise in Self-Serving Apologetics | Uneasy Money
- Jennifer Bissell-Linsk: Robotics in the running for Nike’s factories of the future: “Developing countries could lose low-cost manufacturing if leisurewear companies increase focus on automated production…”
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, Dean Baker and Arjun Jayadev: Intellectual Property for the Twenty-First-Century Economy: “Developing countries are increasingly pushing back against the intellectual property regime foisted on them by the advanced economies over the last 30 years. They are right to do so, because what matters is not only the production of knowledge, but also that it is used in ways that put the health and wellbeing of people ahead of corporate profits…”
- Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan: The DeLong-Shiller Redux
- Dani Rodrik: Policy, Inequality, and Growth:Comments on Jason Furman <— I strongly question Dani Rodrik’s claim that a 1.3% of GDP gain for Mexico is in any sense “minute”…
- Stefania Albanesi, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Jaromir Nosal: Credit growth and the Global Crisis: A new narrative: “Mortgage default during the Great Recession came from real estate investors, not subprime credit holders…. Investors that played a critical role in the rise in mortgage debt, specifically among the middle and the top of the credit score distribution…”
- Yuko Takeo: Abenomics Trickles Down to Smaller Japanese Companies: “Total profits are at a record but labor shortage is biting…”
- Lorenzo Caliendo and Fernando Parro (2014): Estimates of the Trade and Welfare E§ects of NAFTA