Economists Voice最新文献

{"title":"Elections and the Economy: What to do about Recessions?","authors":"Rand Ghayad, M. Cragg, F. Pinter","doi":"10.1515/ev-2016-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2016-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There is no doubt that the US is embedded in a weak economy. Bond markets are now saying that neither inflation rates approaching 2 percent targets or real interest rates substantially above zero are on the horizon anytime in the foreseeable future. Growth forecasts are being revised downwards in most places, and there is growing evidence in the US that inflation expectations are becoming unanchored to the downside. That, along with widening credit spreads and a stronger dollar as Europe and Japan plunge more deeply into the world of negative rates is alarming and suggests that we are at risk of another recession. Presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle have laid out their positions on major issues ranging from taxes, minimum wage, the federal debt, to issues such as immigration, military strategy, and climate change. While candidates’ policy positions differ generally, it is not clear what their priorities are when it comes to most of these issues. In this paper, we apply text analytics to analyze hundreds of thousands of words that appeared in policy releases, interviews, or debate transcripts related to all of the 2016 presidential candidates. Among other things, we find that macroeconomic policy or “what to do about recessions” has been largely ignored by presidential candidates in this year’s election. Perhaps not surprisingly, Donald Trump’s positions are focused on Mexico and China while Hillary Clinton’s positions are heavily focused on gender and social factors. This appears to present a contrast from Bill Clinton’s campaign in the early 1990s, which was focused on America’s declining economy, emphasizing a basic but effective slogan, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!”","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"13 1","pages":"25 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2016-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Overlooked Opportunity: Trade in Services","authors":"J. Jensen","doi":"10.1515/ev-2016-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2016-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Politicians love the manufacturing sector (almost as much as they love farmers). The current administration has in place a number of programs to support the manufacturing and set as a goal to “create one million new manufacturing jobs by the end of 2016.” (Bogage, Jacob. “Obama’s elusive promise to add one million new manufacturing jobs,” Washington Post, May 5, 2016. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obamas-elusive-promise-to-deliver-1-million-new-manufacturing-jobs/2016/05/05/717d8cd0-107a-11e6-93ae-50921721165d_story.html.) The current administration is not alone, both major party presidential nominees also have policies to focus on the manufacturing sector – often involving some type of change to US trade policy. Clinton has back-tracked on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and Trump goes further to propose applying 45 percent tariffs on goods from China and 35 percent on goods from Mexico – all seemingly with an eye to aiding the manufacturing sector. While a rebound in the manufacturing sector would be welcome, it is unlikely to have a material impact on the aggregate US employment picture – in 2012, manufacturing accounted for only about 8 percent of the labor force. Worse, focusing on the manufacturing sector diverts attention from a real opportunity: trade in services. The United States has a significant opportunity for increased growth through exports of business services. Global trade increased almost 7-fold over the period 1980–2010. Services share of world trade has increased from about 15 percent in 1980 to 20 percent in 2010. The United States share of global services trade has grown from about 10 percent in 1980 to 14 percent in 2010 – a growing share of a growing pie (World Trade Organization website. http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/trade_data_e.htm.). The growing middle-class in emerging economies will likely combine to increase demand for services globally [Eichengreen and Gupta (2009) demonstrate a strong correlation between GDP per capita and the share of business services in GDP, suggesting that rising incomes are associated with increased demand for services.].","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"13 1","pages":"1 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2016-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Growing Apart: The Evolution of Income vs. Wealth Inequality","authors":"M. Cragg, Rand Ghayad","doi":"10.1515/ev-2015-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2015-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The gap between the richest Americans and the rest of the nation has changed dramatically over the past three decades – becoming one of the most challenging political and economic trends for the nation. For decades prior to that, the distribution of wealth and income had been relatively stable, so much that a central problem posed in the economics literature was to explain this stability. But beginning in the early 1980s, inequality began to grow rapidly and has recently been attracting substantial attention from policymakers and researchers reflecting a widespread concern that reflecting a widespread concern that growing labor incomes of senior executives, finance professionals, and successful entrepreneurs is entailing large economic costs to society. The dominant paradigm in the media and Washington is that inequality is purely a matter of divergence in earned (labor) income inequality which can be ameliorated by making earned income taxes more progressive and shifting spending to help the poorer. However, this is not the story: wealth inequality, as it turns out, is much worse. This warrants emphasis for a variety of reasons: (1) a growing body of research that suggests that in the head-on comparison it is wealth inequality, rather than income inequality or poverty that has a negative, statistically significant effect on economic growth. 1 Bagchi and Svejnar (2013). (2) Historically societies have failed when wealth has become overly concentrated; and (3) the wedge between earned and unearned income tax rates reduces progressivity as capital income rises. We offer a number of solutions which should generate debate amongst economists as they test conventional wisdom.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"9 1","pages":"1 - 12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2015-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2015-0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hurry or Wait – The Pros and Cons of Going Fast or Slow on Climate Change","authors":"E. Denny, J. Weiss","doi":"10.1515/ev-2015-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2015-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Climate change risk will likely force the de-carbonization of our electricity sector and thus involve massive investments in long-lived assets using many new and emerging technologies. Since technological progress (independent or dependent on deployment) will likely lower the future cost of those technologies, investing early and rapidly forecloses saving money by installing those technologies at a lower cost later. There are thus benefits to waiting until the costs of renewables fall further. However, there are also costs to waiting. First, given the longevity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, cumulative emissions matter and lowering greenhouse gas emissions earlier is beneficial. Second, there is significant uncertainty not only over the rate of change of the cost of low carbon technologies, but also over the cost of greenhouse gas emissions. The costs of waiting are complex in that the distributions themselves are unknown (and quite possibly have “fat” tails). There may also be complex timing issues such as points of no return in terms of global greenhouse gas concentrations, beyond which the costs of adapting to climate change effects become essentially infinite. Hurrying can therefore be considered an insurance policy against the unknown but perhaps increasing risk of catastrophic damage.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"12 1","pages":"19 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2015-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2015-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Political Economy of Net Neutrality Regulation","authors":"Dennis L. Weisman","doi":"10.1515/ev-2015-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2015-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract On February 26, 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed sweeping new regulation for broadband providers. While regulation is typically driven by a combination of economic and political considerations, this article argues that the FCC’s initiative is long on politics and short on economics. For example, the FCC is not able to identify a non-transitory abuse of market power by broadband providers to justify its actions. There is no evidence of excessive returns being earned by broadband providers and the violations of net neutrality that the Commission can point to, including throttling and blocking of data, are conspicuously few in number. What is more, the FCC has yet to establish that the regulatory oversight it proposes would not stifle more investment than it stimulates. Broadband is an example of a two-sided market in which edge (content) providers represent one side of the market and consumers represent the other side of the market. Just as newspapers impose positive prices on both advertisers and subscribers, it is (quite generally) efficient in two-sided markets for both sides of the market to contribute to the total price. Two-sided markets are characterized by a seesaw principle in which a lower price on one side of the market tends to give rise to a higher price on the other side of the market. Hence, a ban on paid prioritization of traffic delivery over broadband networks essentially requires consumers to pay the full freight. The FCC is therefore in the unenviable position of having to justify a policy to regulate broadband that is distinguished by being both economically inefficient and socially inequitable. While the courts are disposed to give deference to expert federal agencies under the Chevron Doctrine, the lack of economic foundation to justify broadband regulation promises to make this tough sledding for the FCC. The strategy on the part of the broadband providers will be to run out the clock with litigation in the hope that the political winds shift in their favor post 2016.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"12 1","pages":"13 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2015-0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Climate Change Adaptation Will Offer a Sharp Test of the Claims of Behavioral Economics","authors":"Matthew E. Kahn","doi":"10.1515/ev-2015-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2015-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Concepts from behavioral economics can be used to make predictions concerning how climate change will impact the economy. Six new predictions from behavioral economics are compared to their rational expectations counterparts.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"12 1","pages":"25 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2015-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Proposed Framework to Reduce Asymmetric Information in Equity Offerings","authors":"Ilanit Gavious","doi":"10.1515/ev-2015-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2015-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The security offering literature shows that firms offering their shares for sale to the public generally manage their earnings upwards around the offering to raise investor demand for the firm’s shares and increase their sale price. In addition, the literature demonstrates that earnings management around the offering increases the information asymmetry between the issuers and outside investors, thereby increasing the issue flotation costs. Markedly increased flotation costs imply, inter alia, a reduced demand for, and pricing of, the new shares offered – the opposite result of that sought by the issuing management. To date, mechanisms to prevent issuing firms from managing earnings opportunistically are non-existent. I address this current gap in the literature by proposing a disclosure-based framework for issuing firms aimed at reducing the extent of information asymmetry between them, outside investors and underwriters. Specifically, I present a mechanism where firms add a voluntary “honest disclosure” section in their issue prospectuses, in which they provide information that reduces uncertainty about their financial reports. I demonstrate that such voluntary disclosures by firms create a reality that encourages truthful reporting around the offering and results in a more effective capital market. The proposed framework does not require a change in current institutional mechanisms. Furthermore, as an integral part of the prospectus, the SEC will scrutinize the disclosure. Last but not least, the new section should not add significant cost to the issuer.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"12 1","pages":"31 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2015-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2015-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Power of Awards","authors":"B. Frey, Jana Gallus","doi":"10.1515/ev-2014-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ev-2014-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Every economist worth his or her salt will tell you that monetary compensation is more efficient than all other forms of rewards. Awards have only received scant attention in the economics literature. Yet, they are ubiquitous. They can take many forms and include titles, prizes, orders, medals, and still other types of decorations. We outline the distinguishing characteristics of awards, especially in comparison to monetary rewards, show the potential risks and emphasize where awards are particularly useful.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"11 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ev-2014-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67361413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Future of US Health Care: Is Medicare Really Better at “Saving” Money?","authors":"A. Edlin, D. Goldman, Adam A. Leive","doi":"10.1515/EV-2013-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/EV-2013-0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, and others see Medicare as a panacea. Krugman, for example, points out that average Medicare costs have grown only 400 percent while private insurance costs have grown 700 percent. Should the US move to Medicare for all? The case is not as clear as such statistics suggest.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"11 1","pages":"13 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2014-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/EV-2013-0013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67360850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Quarterly Fiscal Policy","authors":"D. Kendrick, H. Amman","doi":"10.1515/EV-2013-0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/EV-2013-0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Monetary policy is altered once a month. Fiscal policy is altered once a year. As a potential improvement this article examines the use of feedback control rules for fiscal policy that is altered quarterly. Following the work of Blinder and Orszag, modifications are discussed in Congressional practice and institutions that would facilitate this change.","PeriodicalId":42390,"journal":{"name":"Economists Voice","volume":"11 1","pages":"12 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/EV-2013-0034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67360912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}