The empirical foundations of supply-side economics – Michael Keane – YouTube

Most economists believe male labour supply elasticities are small, but a sizable minority of studies have large values. There is no clear consensus on this point.

The key factor driving these tensions is the failure of most studies to account for human capital returns to work experience.

In a model that includes human capital, even modest elasticities—as conventionally measured—can be consistent with large efficiency costs of taxation.

Conventional estimates of male labour supply elasticities have a severe downward bias because of their failure to include human capital accumulation. The opportunity cost of time includes their after tax wage and present value of increased earnings in all future years.

The return to work experience is high so working more has large long-term payoffs for younger male workers. Wages start low for young grow and then peak in 40s. When adjusted for the return for work experience, a large part of compensation when younger is human capital, and this peters away by the 40s.

Estimates where wages grow with work experience, with the accumulation of human capital, yield large male labour supply elasticities, as high as 3.8 rather than close to zero (Keane 2010, 2011). That is a profound difference.

Women have high labour supply elasticities, especially on the labour force participation margin, as most agree.

Estimates of long-run female labour supply elasticities—estimates that allow for dynamic effects of wages on fertility, marriage, education and work experience—are generally quite high.

Marginal tax rates and labour supply

Americans now work 50 per cent more than do the Germans, French, and Italians. This was not the case in the early 1970s, when the Western Europeans worked more than Americans.

Edward Prescott found that taxes accounted for these differences in labour supply across time and across countries; in particular, the effective marginal tax rate on labour income. The population of countries considered is the G-7 countries, which are major advanced industrial countries. Prescott concluded that

virtually all of the large differences between U.S. labour supply and those of Germany and France are due to differences in tax systems.

Prescott and many that followed him were truly puzzled by the lack of a role for employment mandates, employment protections and product market regulation in Europe’s poor economic performance

Richard Rogerson is a very sharp fellow who built on Prescott’s work. Most anything Rogerson writes is worth a look.

A non-technical note by Rogerson made these key points:

  1. Europe’s taxes punish working outside the home, so Europeans don’t work as much as they would otherwise;

  2. Dramatic differences in the overall change in hours worked per person aged 16 to 64 across countries between 1960 and 2000;

  3. at one extreme the U.S., with an increase of 10 per cent between these two dates;

  4. At the other extreme are Germany and France, with declines of more than 30 per cent;

  5. For the U.S. and France, the difference is staggering—more than 45 per cent;

  6. Richard Freeman and Ronald Schettkat (2001) studied time allocation by married couples in Germany and the United States.

  7. Their striking finding is about total time devoted to work (i.e., market work plus home production) turns out in the two countries is virtually the same.

In The Impact of Labor Taxes on Labor Supply: An International Perspective (AEI Press, 2010) Rogerson finds that:

• a 10 percentage point increase in the tax rate on labour leads to a 10 to 15 per cent decrease in hours of work.

• Even a 5 per cent decrease in hours worked would mean a decline in labour output equating to a serious recession.

• While recessions are temporary, permanent changes in government spending patterns have long-lasting repercussions.

• Although government spending provides citizens with important benefits, such benefits must be weighed against the disincentive effects of increased labour taxes.

• Policymakers who fail to account for the decrease in labour output risk expanding government programs beyond their optimal scale.

The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome

Grandmothers are far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.

Poor grades among their grandchildren is especially dangerous to their golden years

via The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome – Neatorama.

Supply-Side Economics in Iceland

The move to a pay-as-you-earn income tax system in Iceland in 1988 made income earned in 1987 tax-free.
  • Icelandic GDP increased by 4.16% in 1987.
  • Total labour supply rose by 6.7% in 1987 over the average of 1986 and 1988.
  • This included an 8.6% increase in weeks of work supplied by those already in the labour market in 1986.
Notice in the graph the big kink in employment in 1987. A spike just for the year of no taxes. Labour supply then fell away.
Iceland in 1987 was a unique opportunity to study the labour supply response of individuals who were temporarily faced with a zero marginal-and average-income tax rate.

via Corrections: Page One: Supply-Side Economics.

Super-Economy “pre-reviewed ” Piketty in 2010

The French are poorer that the 3rd poorest American state: Arkansas. The EU-15 as a whole would qualify to be the 49th poorest American state.

The rich in Europe are poor by American standards. The poor in the USA are middle class by European standards. The European middle class has smaller houses, few cars and few consumers durables that the average poor in the USA.

via Super-Economy: Dynamic America, Poor Europe  and Tino Sanandaji

Housing space per capita

via Heritage Foundation

The path to higher U.S. prosperity

Suppose the USA:

  1. Had mandatory savings for retirement
  2. Eliminated capital income taxes
  3. Broadened tax base and lowered the marginal tax rate
  4. Phased in reforms so all birth-year cohorts are made better off
  5. Left welfare programs and local public good shares the same
  6. Savings not part of taxable income, saving withdrawals part of taxable income – with these changes U.S. income tax would be a consumption tax

US Detrended GDP per Capita

Source: Edward Prescott and Ellen McGrattan 2013.

Minimum wage was introduced to reduce the employment of women

The minimum wage is a rare policy bird. Its employment effects change at the whim of its latest proponents.

Minimum wages were initially introduced in the USA shortly after 1900 solely for women and children. The express aim was to price women out of jobs and raise men’s wages by enough so that they could provide for their families.

These days, some argue that minimum wages actually increase employment. Times change, and the slopes of supply and demand curves must change with them.

Tim Leonard in Protecting Family and Race The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work showed that these women-only minimum wages were justified by political progressive including women on grounds that they would:

(1) Protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work;

(2) Protect working women from the temptation of prostitution;

(3) Protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and

(4) Ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.”

The above photo from the Minnesota Post has the following caption:

Fuelled by the Progressive Era, Minnesota becomes one of the first dozen states to pass a law establishing work standards for women and children and established a Minimum Wage Commission.

Women-only minimum wage laws were held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1923 but were upheld by a Progressive-dominated Supreme Court in 1937. In the 1930s depression, single-sex, state minimum-wage laws were revived and flourished.

Xenophobia, race prejudice, and sexism should come as no surprise to any student of left-wing politics. Progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century was infested with racism:

  • The support of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), and in the USA, the Democratic Party, for vicious, state-sponsored racism is well known.
  • The ALP supported the passing of the White Australia policy with glee in 1901 by the newly formed Federal Parliament.

As Tim Leonard has shown, in days gone by, budding progressives not only revelled in exposes of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also poured over racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science. Social Democrat Party Sweden practised eugenics until the 1960s.

Richard Epstein “The Coming Meltdown in Labor Relations”

The Death of the Renaissance Man?

Ben Jones in ‘The Burden of Knowledge and the Death of the Renaissance Man: Is Innovation Getting Harder? found that as knowledge accumulates as technology advances, successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden.

Innovators can compensate through lengthening their time in education and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities.

This has implications for the organization of innovative activity – a greater reliance on teamwork – and has negative implications for economic growth.

Jones found that the age at first invention, specialisation, and teamwork increased over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates can also be explained in his framework.

Using data on Nobel Prize winners, Jones found that the mean age at which the innovations are produced to win the Prize has increased by 6 years over the 20th Century.

  • Before 1901, two-thirds of the Nobel laureates did their prize-winning work before the age of 40 and 20 per cent did it before age of 30.
  • By 2000, however, great achievements seldom occurred before the age of 40.

It’s now taking longer for scientists to get their basic training and start their careers. There is simply more to learn because knowledge in all fields has grown by quantum leaps in the past century.

Nobels are being handed out for different types of work than a century ago.

  • There has been a trend away from awarding prizes for abstract, theoretical ideas.
  • Now more honours are being bestowed on people who have made discoveries through painstaking lab work and experimentation – which takes a lot of time to do.

Jones’ theory provides an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort and levels of education and many more graduates.

The more experienced readers of this blog might remember that the better of their professors seemed to be masters of the entire field of economics and could teach almost any subject.

These days, too many professors rely on textbooks with annual editions that come with the lecture notes, assignments and test-banks written for them by the publishing company.

Are there any polymaths left? Posner? Tullock?

Bill Gates “pre-reviewed” Piketty years ago

Bill Gates once said:

You take away the top 20 employees of Microsoft, we’ll just be an ordinary company. Top employees are what makes us.

File:Dts news bill gates wikipedia.JPG

via Gary Becker on Human Capital | Atanu Dey On India’s Development.

The living wage

Why not just increase the family tax credit? That would increase the incomes of poor families without putting their jobs at particular greater risk.

The local calculation of the living wage includes cable TV and an overseas holiday.

Milton Friedman provides some critical truths on the living wage:

Do-Gooders believe passing a law saying nobody shall get less than [a minimum wage] is helping poor people (who need the money).

You’re doing nothing of the kind.

What you’re doing is to ensure that people whose skills do not justify that wage will be unemployed.

Inequality as a Barrier to Growth? Invented Out of Thin Air | e21

Error 1: Use of Pre-Tax, Pre-Transfer Income to Measure Inequality. Throughout the report, the IMF uses the concept of “market income” to measure inequality. Market income is defined as income before taxes are paid to the government, and before transfers from the government to low-income individuals…

Error 2: More Inequality Leads to Lower Mobility. … Data from University of Ottawa professor Miles Corak on the United States, Canada, and Sweden suggest that more inequality is associated with higher mobility, not less mobility. Winship’s findings echo those of Harvard University economist Raj Chetty, who found little association between the share of income of the top one percent and mobility, either in the United States or between different countries…

Error 3: Tax Increases Lead to Higher Economic Growth… If transfers of income from one group to another succeeded in creating economic growth, the fastest-growing countries would be those with the highest top tax rates. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Edward Prescott has shown, the reverse is true.

via Inequality as a Barrier to Growth? Invented Out of Thin Air | e21 – Economic Policies for the 21st Century.

Robert Doar on 10 welfare reform lessons

In the National Review, Robert Doar set-out these from his time as commissioner of the New York City social service agency between 2007 and 2013:

  1. Always promote personal responsibility.
  2. Employment is far better than training and education.
  3. Making work pay is welfare reform too.
  4. Be honest about the importance of married two-parent families.
  5. Caseworkers don’t cost much; benefits do.
  6. Medicaid is where the money is.
  7. Immigrants get welfare too.
  8. Welfare recipients (and workers too) will try to "get over."  "To get over" is a very New York expression meaning to steal 
  9. When it comes to the disabled, trust but verify.
  10. Always cheer for the economy.

Figure 1: WELFARE CASELOADS AND RECIPIENTS (AFDC AND TANF PROGRAMS), IN THOUSANDS

Welfare caseloads have declined since the 1996 welfare reform

Source: Administration for Children and Families, TANF caseload data, 2011.

I should add that after the 1996 federal welfare reforms in the USA that time limited life-time federal welfare receipt to 5-years, the 2/3rd decline in welfare participation and the gains in employment were largest among the single mothers previously thought to be most disadvantaged: young (ages 18-29), mothers with children aged under seven, high school drop-outs, and black and Hispanic mothers. These low-skilled single mothers were thought to face the greatest barriers to employment. Blank (2002) found that:

nobody of any political persuasion predicted or would have believed possible the magnitude of change that occurred in the behaviour of low-income single-parent families.

Stumbling and Mumbling: 12 alternative principles to Thomas Sargent’s

1. People have different motivations: wealth, power, pride, job satisfaction and so on. Incentive structures which suit one set of motives might not work for another.

2. Many things are true but not very significantly so.

3. Power matters: conventional economics under-states this.

4. Luck matters. The R-squareds in Mincer equations are generally low.

5. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and in an organization.

6. Individual rationality sometimes produces outcomes which are socially optimal as in Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and sometimes not.

7. Trade-offs between values are more common than politicians pretend, but are not ubiquitous.

8. Cognitive biases are everywhere.

9. Everything matters at the margin, but the margin might not be very extensive.

10. The social sciences are all about mechanisms. The question is: which ones work when and where? This means there are few if any universal laws in the social sciences; context matters.

11. Accurate economic forecasting is impossible. But time-varying risk premia might give us a little predictability.

12. Risk comes in many types. Reducing one type of it often means increasing exposure to another type.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling: 12 alternative principles.

Super-Economy: The class struggle in one picture

In the U.S. and Japan, 15% of workers have their wages determined by unions. In Sweden and France, 90% of workers are covered by union collective agreements.

  • Social Democrats argue that unions and collective bargaining improve the earnings of the working class relative to the owners of capital.
  • Neoclassical economic theory predicts that competition among firms for workers ensures that they earn wages equal to the additional revenue that the firm earns by employing them.

Tino Sanandaji at his Super-Economy blog plotted the share of workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements and the share of national factor costs that goes to labour as wages and other employee compensations:

The way the economy gets divided between capitalists and workers is virtually identical in weak union countries such as the U.S. as it is in countries with powerful unions, such as France and Sweden.

If anything, American workers with weak unions get a bigger share of the cake compared to European workers with strong unions. Due to high labour costs, European workers have to some extent been replaced by machines.

via Super-Economy: The class struggle in one picture.

Previous Older Entries Next Newer Entries

Fardels Bear

A History of the Alt-Right

Vincent Geloso

Econ Prof at George Mason University, Economic Historian, Québécois

Bassett, Brash & Hide

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Truth on the Market

Scholarly commentary on law, economics, and more

The Undercover Historian

Beatrice Cherrier's blog

Matua Kahurangi

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Temple of Sociology

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Why Evolution Is True

Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.

Down to Earth Kiwi

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

NoTricksZone

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Homepaddock

A rural perspective with a blue tint by Ele Ludemann

Kiwiblog

DPF's Kiwiblog - Fomenting Happy Mischief since 2003

The Dangerous Economist

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Watts Up With That?

The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change

The Logical Place

Tim Harding's writings on rationality, informal logic and skepticism

Doc's Books

A window into Doc Freiberger's library

The Risk-Monger

Let's examine hard decisions!

Uneasy Money

Commentary on monetary policy in the spirit of R. G. Hawtrey

Barrie Saunders

Thoughts on public policy and the media

Liberty Scott

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Point of Order

Politics and the economy

James Bowden's Blog

A blog (primarily) on Canadian and Commonwealth political history and institutions

Science Matters

Reading between the lines, and underneath the hype.

Peter Winsley

Economics, and such stuff as dreams are made on

A Venerable Puzzle

"The British constitution has always been puzzling, and always will be." --Queen Elizabeth II

The Antiplanner

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Bet On It

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

History of Sorts

WORLD WAR II, MUSIC, HISTORY, HOLOCAUST

Roger Pielke Jr.

Undisciplined scholar, recovering academic

Offsetting Behaviour

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

JONATHAN TURLEY

Res ipsa loquitur - The thing itself speaks

Conversable Economist

In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”

The Victorian Commons

Researching the House of Commons, 1832-1868

The History of Parliament

Articles and research from the History of Parliament Trust

Books & Boots

Reflections on books and art

Legal History Miscellany

Posts on the History of Law, Crime, and Justice

Sex, Drugs and Economics

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

European Royal History

Exploring the Monarchs of Europe

Tallbloke's Talkshop

Cutting edge science you can dice with

Marginal REVOLUTION

Small Steps Toward A Much Better World

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.

STOP THESE THINGS

The truth about the great wind power fraud - we're not here to debate the wind industry, we're here to destroy it.

Lindsay Mitchell

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Alt-M

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law