The principle of competitive land supply – Anthony Downs
16 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of regulation, urban economics Tags: Anthony Downs, green rent seeking, housing affordability, land supply, land use regulation, NIMBYs, offsetting behaviour, RMA, unintended consequences
Housing affordability trends in New Zealand and the case for a capital gains tax
14 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of regulation, Public Choice, public economics, rentseeking, urban economics Tags: Auckland, capital gains tax, housing affordability, RMA
If the affordability crisis in New Zealand is demand side driven requiring capital gains tax to temper that demand, why is the affordability crisis so marked in one city? Does that make a case for a capital gains tax only on Auckland or suggest the capital gains tax is trying to solve the wrong problem.
via demographia.com
Annual hours worked per working age American, German and French, 1950–2013
12 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, economic history, great depression, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, politics - USA, Public Choice, public economics, taxation Tags: Edward Prescott, Euroclerosis, France, Germany, labour supply, Robert Lucas, taxation and labour supply
Figure 1 shows that Americans work the same hours per year pretty much the entire post-war period. By contrast, there is been a long decline in hours worked in Germany and France. The large drop in 1992 was German unification.
Figure 1: annual hours worked per working age American, German and French, 1950 – 2013
Source: OECD StatExtract and The Conference Board Total Economy Database™,January 2014, http://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/
The long decline seemed to tally with the disproportionately sharp rise in the average tax rate on labour income, including social security contributions in France and Germany. When tax rates on labour income, including social security contributions stabilised in about 1980, hours worked stabilised in all countries.
Figure 2: average tax rate on labour income,USA, Germany and France, 1950 – 2013
Source: Source: Cara McDaniel.
Some pander to the great vacation theory of European labour supply. This is the hypothesis of a large increase in the preference for leisure in the European Union member states. That is, mass voluntary unemployment and mass voluntary reductions and labour supply by choice by Europeans. They just decided to work less.
This is not the first outing for the great vacation theory of labour supply. In the late 1970s, Modigliani dismissed the new classical explanation of Lucas and Rapping (1969) of the U.S. great depression in which the 1930s unemployment was voluntary unemployment – the great depression was just a great vacation – with the following remarks:
Sargent (1976) has attempted to remedy this fatal flaw by hypothesizing that the persistent and large fluctuations in unemployment reflect merely corresponding swings in the natural rate itself.
In other words, what happened to the U.S. in the 1930’s was a severe attack of contagious laziness!
I can only say that, despite Sargent’s ingenuity, neither I nor, I expect most others at least of the non-Monetarist persuasion, are quite ready yet. to turn over the field of economic fluctuations to the social psychologist!
As Prescott has pointed out, the USA in the Great Depression and France since the 1970s both had 30% drops in hours worked per adult. That is why Prescott refers to France’s economy as depressed. The reason for the depressed state of the French (and German) economies is taxes, according to Prescott:
Virtually all of the large differences between U.S. labour supply and those of Germany and France are due to differences in tax systems.
Europeans face higher tax rates than Americans, and European tax rates have risen significantly over the past several decades.
Countries with high tax rates devote less time to market work, but more time to home activities, such as cooking and cleaning. The European services sector is much smaller than in the USA.
Time use studies find that lower hours of market work in Europe is entirely offset by higher hours of home production, implying that Europeans do not enjoy more leisure than Americans despite the widespread impression that they do. Europeans did not work less. They worked more on activities that were not taxed.
The robots are coming, the robots are coming – been there, done that in Japan
12 May 2015 1 Comment
in applied price theory, development economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, growth miracles, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, survivor principle, unemployment Tags: creative destruction, entrepreneurial alertness, innovation, Japan, technological unemployment
When I was a kid, I used to like reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I read them from cover to cover.
One of the things I recalled from the Encyclopaedia Britannica was that in 1961 nearly half of the Japanese workforce worked in the agricultural sector.
I notice that anomaly when I was reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Japan in the 1970s. Japan had undergoing an economic transformation since my Encyclopaedia Britannica’s were written in 1961. It was very much out of date.
Australian manufacturing was being outcompeted in every direction from automobiles to clothing and footwear by the Japanese manufacturing sector back when I was a teenager.
The Japanese economic miracle absorbed the Japanese agricultural labour force without anybody having time to shout "the robots are coming, the robots are coming".
There is a lesson in there somewhere for the current breathless journalism, with far too many academic fellow travellers about "the robots are coming, the robots are coming".
When I was a student at graduate school in Japan, I visited a Japanese factory in 1996 that was completely automated bar one function. Only once did a human hand actually touch the electrical goods they were making. Naturally, at the Q&A session at the end of our visit, I asked when was his job going to be automated.
The economic forces underpinning the housing affordability crisis
12 May 2015 2 Comments
in applied price theory, economics of regulation, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, land supply, land use regulation, RMA, zoning
The key point is that increases (declines) in demand can bring sharply rising (falling) house prices when supply is constrained. However, when land supply is not regulated, it adjusts to demand and house price volatility is reduced.
As long as commentators focus primarily on the demand side of the housing market, whilst ignoring supply-side constraints, they will never fully understand the drivers of housing bubbles and busts. The resulting incorrect diagnosis will inevitably lead to poor policy prescriptions and outcomes.
How Taxes Affect Investment Decisions For Multinational Firms
11 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, public economics Tags: company tax rates, foreign investment, multinational corporations, tax competition
How Taxes Affect Investment Decisions For Multinational Firms onforb.es/1Oe5lKu by @ErikCederwall http://t.co/BduZZbHs2n—
Tax Foundation (@taxfoundation) April 15, 2015
The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom
10 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, Austrian economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, economics of education, economics of information, economics of media and culture, economics of regulation, energy economics, entrepreneurship, financial economics, health economics, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: David Anderson, evidence-based policy, offsetting behaviour, pretence to knowledge, The fatal conceit, unintended consequences
via The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom, David Henderson | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.
How to build a business?
09 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: corporate capitalism, crony capitalism, entrepreneurial alertness, rent seeking
Media bias is not new
09 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of information, economics of media and culture, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: media bias
FA Hayek on piecemeal analysis such as cost benefit analysis and evidence-based policy
09 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, Austrian economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of regulation, F.A. Hayek Tags: Constitution of Liberty, cost benefit analysis, evidence-based policy, offsetting behaviour, The fatal conceit, The pretence to knowledge, unintended consequences
Happy Birthday, F.A. Hayek!
(8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) http://t.co/K431Kj9nok—
Screwed by State (@ScrewedbyState) May 09, 2015
Greg Mankiw: Why I invest in index funds
09 May 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, entrepreneurship, financial economics Tags: active investing, efficient markets hypothesis, entrepreneurial alertness, Greg Mankiw, passive investing
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