Some new research by Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez, Nathaniel Hendren, and Patrick Kline finds that the likelihood of poor children moving up the income ladder in early adulthood varies dramatically by metro area in the United States. In places like … Continue reading
A new paper says that the income tax rate in socially useful jobs should be lower than in socially useless ones – here, regular guest-poster Charlotte Cavaille gives this argument a once-over, as part of a pair of posts on tax. With … Continue reading
If you’re reading this blog, then you’re probably interested in ‘the truth’ – by which I mean that you’re interested in the way the world really is, rather than pretending it’s the way you want it to be. We tend … Continue reading
To balance the budget, Republicans want to raise revenue by getting rid of tax loopholes instead of raising rates. If we are getting rid of loopholes, what about eliminating the income tax deduction on charitable contributions? Ending the charitable deduction … Continue reading
At the recent launch of Kate Bell & Declan Gaffney’s report on the ‘nothing for something’ benefits system, Richard Exell of the TUC asked if people had become more sympathetic to tax-dodging at the same time as they’ve become more hostile to … Continue reading
You might think that the days of the glorious, all-knowing economist are behind us, in the midst of savagely bleak times at least partly caused by economistic hubris. But clearly there’s still a space in our hearts to hear economists … Continue reading
Looking at the behaviour of elite sportsmen is a favourite hobby of economists – aside from many economists being sports geeks (I’m not in a position to call names here…), there’s a wealth of publicly available data just waiting to … Continue reading
Congressional Republicans who favor raising taxes on the rich to reduce the deficit are harder to find these days than salad at a state fair. One argument that is commonly made is that we cannot expect the rich to pay … Continue reading
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the Human Development Project, a project sponsored by the Social Science Research Council to develop indicators of individual wellbeing across U.S. states and demographic groups. The basic idea is to … Continue reading
American income inequality is commonly told as a story of divergence: since the 1970s, the share of income going to the top of income distribution has skyrocketed, while the share of income going to the bottom of the income distribution … Continue reading
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