jdikatz

Interesting. But this is pointing out a classic statistical result that cohort, calendar time, and age effects can’t be nonparametically separated. So we cant know, based on just observational data, what is society getting more liberal, people getting more liberal, or less liberal cohorts dying (unless you’re willing to assume one of these trends takes a low dimensional functional form, but that’s sort of assuming the answer).

NBER version: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936

Should have been more precise. By "social spending" I mean sum of (tax revenue) + (donations to charities), since 1% decrease in revenue translates to >1% increase in donations to charity. Agreed that this says nothing about "net social benefits," since it depends on the value of government vs. social spending.

My point is only that the elasticity is above 1, since if it were below 1 then there would be literally no justification for deductions. In that case, 1% reduction in tax revenue from deductions would lead to a less than 1% increase in giving, so the government could increase aggregate funding for charities by killing deductions and issuing grants. Elasticity >1 opens the door for deductions being sensible depending on objectives and use of funds by gvt vs. charities.

Note this is not a spending multiplier, so the comparison with government spending multipliers is irrelevant. The relevant comparison there would be, for example, GDP (or ideally the "social") impact of each dollar in charitable spending. I don't know what that is and it probably varies by charity.

Typical estimates suggest a 1% increase in tax expenditure on charitable deductions (so government forgone revenue due to deductions) leads to a more than 1% increase in charitable giving, so deductions increase social spending (see p170 in https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.25.2.157)

But could be distributional issues as well depending on where the rich choose to donate — lots of that money is probably implicit transfers from government revenues to the Met

I’m a fan of right to repair, but I think it’s odd to include privacy / data breech concerns as an advocacy point. Operationalizing right to repair typically means making software more interoperable and sharing access information with third parties, which probably isn’t great for privacy / data security. This was the main tack that auto companies took when fighting a recent MA ballot initiative (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_...), and there could be at least some truth to it.

Even if peer review doesn't actually signal paper quality, it's still useful for science journalists to note whether a paper is in its final form or still a work in progress. Referring to unpublished papers as "pre-prints" or "working papers" could be a less biased way to do so.

Also, it's hard to tell whether peer review actually improves paper quality by comparing published / unpublished papers in a world with peer review, where everyone is writing with the knowledge they'll be intensely scrutinized. Without some sort of detailed review process -- even one that's potentially deeply flawed -- researchers would have fewer incentives to be careful.

Cool idea —- also makes me realize that if GitHub can see commit history of all repos, then Microsoft has a lot of partly identified info on personnel movement across teams within lots of companies and also across companies

Agreed. Currently devouring the Russian revolution series: concrete decisions on reforms are made based on elite opinion of conditions on the ground, and arguments to sway those opinions can turn on seemingly minor events / personalities

On (1), I’m speaking from an allocative efficiency standpoint (should have been more precise). For example, say I’m a company selling in NY, I can locate production in NJ or AZ, and pretax it is cheapest to locate in NJ. If AZ offers a tax incentive that makes it cheaper for me to locate in AZ I’ll do it, but if you sum up pretax revenue minus costs they are lower than had I located in NJ. So this is a transfer from NJ coffers to company profits + AZ coffers, but it is negative sum.

Not sure I understand what you’re saying on (ii). I think you’re saying that if countries have to compete for business, then, holding fixed their statutory tax rate, they have an incentive to improve bureaucratic efficiency to increase resources available (given the statutory tax rate). But I think the issue is you get competition on the statutory rate, which pushes rates towards zero. I actually think a minimum tax which binds and hence constrains the statutory rate could provide a great incentive along the lines youre talking about to optimize bureaucracy.

On (iii), I’m guessing a minimum tax wouldn’t bind in countries willing to explicitly expropriate FDI. Also having a minimum could limit the scope to vary effective rates for individual companies as carrots / sticks, which if anything could reduce corruption.

First, tax competition creates its own inefficiencies —- companies locate production in low tax jurisdictions instead of optimal locations given local skills, factor prices, etc.

Second, this argument only makes sense if you think tax competition leads to “innovation” in tax policy, but it’s not clear why that would be the case. Almost any kind of tax structure is jurisdictional and would be undone by zero-sum competition between countries.

Third, would this hurt developing countries? Right now this is a voluntary agreement between developed countries to achieve a common goal, so that complaint isn’t super relevant. Think of multilateral tariff reduction agreements —- it’s often a good idea to unilaterally put up tariffs if everyone else lowers them, which can result in a high-tariff equilibrium even if each player would like lower global tariffs. Multilateral agreements are the way to achieve the collectively desired outcome that can’t be achieved in a decentralized way.

But a global minimum tax could be also be a good idea for lower income countries, if it’s not set too high. Typically the economic incentives are there to locate especially production in the developing world. If all developing countries had the same minimum tax, then companies couldn’t play developing countries off one another to get lower tax. Lower income countries would reap more gains from globalization and have more funds to eg invest in infrastructure and development.

Some recent experimental evidence consistent with Facebook being addictive and showing that helping people quit makes them happier: http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf

Would be interesting to see whether insurers with higher market share become less likely to cover ransom payments compared with smaller players —- the idea being that payments finance and incentivize future attacks, and insurers with higher market share are more likely to be on the hook for those.

My understanding is that most of his decline in net worth is due to problems with branding and security at his hotels / resorts -- i.e. problems with his non-publicly traded assets. In my mind, this would, if anything, create additional incentives for him to move public markets for his financial benefit to recover some of the money he's lost elsewhere.

This is a reasonable concern. And indeed we only (currently) track holdings of publicly-traded securities, where for some senators a decent fraction of assets are in privately-held companies or things like property investments. We take some solace in the fact that officials are required to disclose trades by spouses + dependents (which we include in our calculations), but you're right that we could be missing more illicit activity.

We hope that this work highlights potential dangers of allowing officials to trade in individual stocks, and encourage more robust legislation that would limit the sort of activity you're describing. Obviously very idealistic, but that's the goal.

Hi Alexandra, this is a great suggestion! We're still figuring out what the right set of benchmarks for "market" returns are -- right now we use the S&P 500, but are also considering alternatives like passive age-appropriate target date funds and portfolios constructed using Fama-French factor weights. But we will ultimately add a panel that shows abnormal returns for each official as you suggest.

The 2012 STOCK Act requires disclosure of all assets exceeding $1,000 in value -- so the disclosure information we collect includes private holdings. We only calculate financial returns for listed assets.

This is an active topic in our research pipeline -- specifically, whether holdings in private companies are going up among officials. Returns in private companies are certainly less transparent, so this might be the way to go if an official wanted to obfuscate.

Yeah this will probably end up being one of our benchmarks -- it's commonly used in academic literature to measure abnormal returns.

We include all senators who were in office sometime between Jan 1, 2014-present. Senators are removed as they leave office (and no longer included when calculating the "all senate" index).

Thanks! We are in the process of adding data on House members and members of the executive branch (who also have to disclose).

We use adjusted close data pulled from Yahoo Finance to calculate daily returns. Adjusted close prices include adjustments for all applicable splits and dividend distributions.

"Launching with a Parachute: The Gig Economy and New Business Formation." NBER WP update (gated): https://www.nber.org/papers/w27183