Research Database

An important contention of Proposition 13's proponents was that a tax reduction would boost economic activity. It is too early to ascertain whether or not this has happened in California. This study addresses the issue in a more general context by attempting to answer the question: Do state and local taxes affect economic growth? Economic theory tells us that a change in the level of state and local taxes might affect economic growth in a number of ways, but the direction of the net result is not obvious. The methodology used here is multiple regression analysis across states. The major contribution of this study is the use of other variables besides taxes to explain growth in personal income, reducing possible biases in the results of previous work in this area. The results of this study indicate that state and local taxes may be a significant deterrent to growth in personal income.

This paper integrates and extends some recent computational advances in Bayesian inference with the objective of more fully realizing the Bayesian promise of coherent inference and model comparison in economics. It combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and independence Monte Carlo with importance sampling to provide an efficient and generic method for updating posterior distributions. It exploits the multiplicative decomposition of marginalized likelihood into predictive factors, to compute posterior odds ratios efficiently and with minimal further investment in software. It argues for the use of predictive odds ratios in model comparison in economics. Finally, it suggests procedures for public reporting that will enable remote clients to conveniently modify priors, form posterior expectations of their own functions of interest, and update the posterior distribution with new observations. A series of examples explores the practicality and efficiency of these methods.

U.S. government concerns about great disparities in housing conditions are at least 100 years old. For the first 50 years of this period, U.S. housing crises were widely considered to stem from the failure of the construction industry to adopt new technology -- in particular, factory production methods. The introduction of these methods in many industries had already greatly narrowed the quality of goods consumed by low- and high-income Americans. It was widely known why the industry failed to adopt these methods: Monopolies in traditional construction blocked and sabotaged them. Very little has changed in the last 50 years. The industry still fails to adopt factory methods, with monopolies, like HUD and NAHB, blocking attempts to adopt them. As a result, the productivity record of the construction industry has been horrendous. One thing has changed. Today there is very little discussion of factory-built housing; of the very few that recognize the industry's failure to adopt factory methods, there is no realization that monopolies are blocking the methods. That these monopolies, in particular, HUD and NAHB, can cause so much hardship in our country, and through misinformation and deceit cover it up, seems almost beyond belief. But, unfortunately, it's a history that is not uncommon. There are many other industries where monopolies have inflicted great harm on Americans, like the tobacco industry, yet through misinformation and deceit cover up the great harm.

The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the vast inequalities that exist within the US economy. As the virus has spread silently, it has laid bare other crises that face our nation---especially the economic vulnerabilities of the country's poor and marginalized. Many of these vulnerabilities can, in fact, be traced back to a single cause that itself has spread silently, but over the last several decades, not months: Monopolies. That monopolies are "silent spreaders of poverty and economic inequality" was well known to economic and legal scholars of the 1930s and 1940s. Wendell Berge, who was Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the 1940s, wrote: "Monopoly conditions have often grown up almost unnoticed by the public until one day it is suddenly realized that an industry is no longer competitive but is governed by an economic oligarchy." The harm caused by these monopolies that have mostly avoided detection often exist in markets with small firms, low concentration levels, and small price-cost margins, as in residential construction, or wreak their harm in public institutions, where prices and concentration have no meaning. While there has been a very welcome resurgence in the concern about monopolies in the last decade or so, this has primarily involved vast corporations, and often about their threat to democratic institutions. Though greatly welcomed, we should not let apprehension with these larger companies distract us from the many hidden monopolies that have silently spread harm to the poor for the last 100 years -- not just the last 10 or so. We should stand on the shoulders of giants that taught us this about monopolies, not only Berge, but Thurman Arnold, Henry Simons, and others.

In this paper we consider a particular international economic policy regime: the laissez-faire regime, the distinguishing features of which are unrestricted portfolio choice and floating exchange rates. And as we show, that regime, although favored by many economists, is not economically feasible. It does not have a determinate equilibrium. That is an implication of an over-lapping-generations model. But as we argue in the paper, that is no reason for doubting the indeterminacy of the laissez-faire regime equilibrium.

We prove the existence of a competitive equilibrium in an overlapping generations model in which each generation has a preference ordering over its own and its descendents’ consumptions. The model is one of pure exchange with many goods in each period and two period lived generations. The bequest from one generation to the next is required to be non-negative and is endogenous. In equilibrium, some sequences of agents of successive generations may be continually “linked” by positive bequests and act as infinitely lived agents. Other sequences of agents may not be so linked and therefore behave as sequences of finite lived agents. We give three examples which illustrate the following points: (i) multiple equilibria may exist some of which resemble those of standard overlapping generations models, whereas in others some sequences of agents behave as if infinitely lived, (ii) multiple steady states of the above two types may exist in which the latter are unstable and the former are stable, and (iii) if agents have preferences given by discounted sums of utilities with different discount rates, then not all sequences of generations can be continually linked and hence behave as infinitely lived agents.

This document contains detailed algebra for the proofs of propositions 1 and 2.

We analyze optimal policy in a simple small open economy model with price setting frictions. In particular, we study the optimal response of the nominal exchange rate following a terms of trade shock. We depart from the New Keynesian literature in that we explicitly model interna-tionally traded commodities as intermediate inputs in the production of local final goods and assume that the small open economy takes this price as given. This modification not only is in line with the long-standing tradition of small open economy models, but also changes the optimal movements in the exchange rate. In contrast with the recent small open economy New Keynesian literature, our model is able to reproduce the comovement between the nominal exchange rate and the price of exports, as it has been documented in the commodity currencies literature. Although we show there are preferences for which price stability is optimal even without flexible fiscal instruments, our model suggests that more attention should be given to the coordination between monetary and fiscal policy (taxes) in small open economies that are heavily dependent on exports of commodities. The model we propose is a useful framework in which to study fear of floating.