Monthly Archives: February 2013

Labs of Democracy & Today’s Fiscal Policy Debates

Here’s my latest Economix column on the labs of democracy & today’s fiscal policy debates on uncertainty, spending, and spending vs taxes: Many of the fiercest disagreements about fiscal policy today stem from disagreements about the causes of the slow … Continue reading

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Fiscal Policy and MPC Heterogeneity

Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri have a recent paper called Fiscal Policy and MPC Heterogeneity. Here’s an interesting figure from it that shows how MPC varies by cash-on-hand: They aren’t the only ones who document MPC heterogeneity. Dynan, Skinner, Zeldes  have a … Continue reading

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The Types of Things that Congress Should be Considering

From the Hamilton Project (and recently highlighted by Dylan Matthews): An Enduring Social Safety Net Transitioning to Bundled Payments in Medicare Reforming Federal Support for Risky Development Restructuring Cost Sharing and Supplemental Insurance for Medicare An Evidence-Based Path to Disability Insurance … Continue reading

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Shrinking Revenue Offers

Jared Bernstein has a nice, but depressing chart on various revenue offers between Obama and Boehner.

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Accounting for the Cost of US Healthcare

I read Steven Brill’s healthcare piece recently and wanted to get a better high-level view of where dollars in the healthcare system are spent. I find aggregate data more informative than anecdotes about hospital bill line items (not that I … Continue reading

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Fraud & Housing Finance:

A new paper from Tomasz Piskorski, Amit Seru, and James Witkin, which was recently featured in the economist. ABSTRACT: We contend that buyers received false information about the true quality of assets in contractual disclosures by intermediaries during the sale … Continue reading

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Crunch Time: Fiscal Crises and the Role of Monetary Policy

A nice chart from a new speech from Jerome Powell. What doesn’t follow is that we need to get the red line up by cutting spending to get the blue line down (based on the logic of Delong Summers and … Continue reading

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Do fixed patent terms distort innovation? Evidence from cancer clinical trials

A new paper from Heidi Williams, Eric Budish, and Benjamin N. Roin: ABSTRACT: Patents award innovators a fixed period of market exclusivity, e.g., 20 years in the United States. Yet, since in many industries firms file patents at the time of discovery … Continue reading

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The Obama Public Works Plan

There are three elements of this plan according to the NYTimes: 1. The first element of the plan is a “fix it first” policy that calls for investing $50 billion in transportation infrastructure, subject to Congressional approval. Fully $40 billion of … Continue reading

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Railroaded & The Effectiveness of Historical Government Infrastructure Investments

A historian recently recommended this book to me – it takes a pretty critical view of subsidies for infrastructure historically and sounds like a good book.

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