I’ll Be on Marketplace Tonight
Nancy Marshall Genzer is doing a story for Marketplace tonight on the repeal of insurers’ exemption of certain federal antitrust law (McCarran-Ferguson). She claims she’ll be able to extract something sensible from the interview we just did. If so, I’ll be on the air. Check online for local air times.
Background reading: The recent Kaiser Health News piece by me and Ian.
Reviewing Academic Literature: Service, Lament, and Offer
Another dump of new NBER papers just came through. There are several I’d like to read and possibly summarize for this blog. As a service, I’m including the abstracts for those below. My lament is that I may not get to them all. There is too much to read and not enough time. And this is just a small slice of the new literature from all sources.
Hence, this offer: if anyone out there reads any of these and wants to send a guest post summary I’ll consider posting. I can’t promise publication in advance or else that blows any chance at quality control. FYI, I’ve printed the last one listed, on empirical industrial organization, because it is most relevant to my work. If I summarize any of these for this blog that one will be first.
Economics of estate taxation: a brief review of theory and evidence use, Wojciech Kopczuk, NBER Working Paper No. 15741. This paper provides a non-technical overview of the economic arguments related to the desirability of transfer taxation and a summary of empirical evidence surrounding these issues. Understanding optimal transfer taxation throughout the distribution requires understanding the nature of a bequest motive, a topic on which there is little consensus. However, I argue that progress still can be made on the question of desirability and optimal level of estate taxation at the top of the distribution, because interpersonal externalities implied by the presence of bequest motive are irrelevant from the welfare point of view when the focus is on the wealthy. I also examine the role of negative externalities from wealth concentration in providing justification for considering this type of taxation.
Students Choosing Colleges: Understanding the Matriculation Decision at a Highly Selective Private Institution, Peter Nurnberg, Morton Schapiro, David Zimmerman, NBER Working Paper No. 15772. The college choice process can be reduced to three questions: 1) Where does a student apply? 2) Which schools accept the students? 3) Which offer of admission does the student accept? This paper addresses question three. Specifically, we offer an econometric analysis of the matriculation decisions made by students accepted to Williams College, one of the nation’s most highly selective colleges and universities. We use data for the Williams classes of 2008 through 2012 to estimate a yield model. We find that—conditional on the student applying to and being accepted by Williams—applicant quality as measured by standardized tests, high school GPA and the like, the net price a particular student faces (the sticker price minus institutional financial aid), the applicant’s race and geographic origin, plus the student’s artistic, athletic and academic interests, are strong predictors of whether or not the student will matriculate.
Foreclosures, Enforcement, and Collections under the Federal Mortgage Modification Guidelines, Casey B. Mulligan, NBER Working Paper No. 15777. Federal mortgage modification initiatives, targeting millions of borrowers, are intended to prevent foreclosures of underwater home mortgages. Those initiatives discourage principal reductions in favor of interest reductions, despite the possibility that the former would be a more durable foreclosure prevention tool. The programs also impose marginal income tax rates substantially in excess of 100 percent. Using the framework of optimal income taxation, this paper shows how alternative means-tested modification rules would simultaneously improve collections, efficiency, the number of foreclosures, and their total cost. As a result, lenders have an incentive to foreclose on borrowers deemed modification eligible by the federal programs.
“Unfunded Liabilities” and Uncertain Fiscal Financing, Troy Davig, Eric M. Leeper, Todd B. Walker, NBER Working Paper No. 15782. We develop a rational expectations framework to study the consequences of alternative means to resolve the “unfunded liabilities” problem—unsustainable exponential growth in federal Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending with no plan to finance it. Resolution requires specifying a probability distribution for how and when monetary and fiscal policies will change as the economy evolves through the 21st century. Beliefs based on that distribution determine the existence of and the nature of equilibrium. We consider policies that in expectation combine reaching a fiscal limit, some distorting taxation, modest inflation, and some reneging on the government’s promised transfers. In the equilibrium, inflation-targeting monetary policy cannot successfully anchor expected inflation. Expectational effects are always present, but need not have large impacts on inflation and interest rates in the short and medium runs.
Empirical Industrial Organization: A Progress Report, Liran Einav, Jonathan D. Levin, NBER Working Paper No. 15786. The field of Industrial Organization has made dramatic advances over the last few decades in developing empirical methods for analyzing imperfect competition and the organization of markets. We describe the motivation for these developments and some of the successes. We also discuss the relative emphasis that applied work in the field has placed on economic theory relative to statistical research design, and the possibility that a focus on methodological innovation has crowded out applications. We offer some suggestions about how the field may progress in coming years.
Steve Pizer, Co-Blogger
I’m pleased to announce that Steve Pizer has joined The Incidental Economist’s team of bloggers. Steve is a health economist with the Department of Veterans Affairs and an Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Boston University’s School of Public Health.
Regular readers already know him. He has authored a few guest posts and some collaborative posts with me. I know Steve very well, having worked with him for over a decade. He and I have teamed up on dozens of research projects and co-authored numerous academic publications. Also, he has been contributing unofficially to The Incidental Economist from the beginning as an adviser, sounding board, and occasional instigator of memes I might not have otherwise touched (devilish, no?).
It may seem redundant to have two health economists blogging here. But Steve’s focus will likely be different from mine, and his posts will be less frequent. For example, he has a comparative advantage in politics, in which he has some experience. He also has different personal interests and life experience. Since we already work so well professionally I am confident we’ll work well as co-bloggers too.
Welcome Steve. Blog away!
(By the way, those of you who subscribe by e-mail will now have an even harder time knowing whose post is whose. E-mailed blog posts don’t contain a by-line, a limitation of the tool. If you want to know who has written what, come to the site itself or do yourself a really big favor and use Google Reader and subscribe via RSS feed.)
Housekeeping Note
This weekend I’m moving this blog to a new web hosting account. I only vaguely know what that even means. But, rest assured, I’ve got an experienced adviser to talk me through it. In fact, it’s TFB. He’s kindly kept me under his wing at his host account since this blog began. Now we’re parting ways <sniff>.
Actually, it’s for a happy reason. Our combined blog traffic is overwhelming the permitted bandwidth for his account. When I have my own both our sites will run better.
If things work right, you should not notice a thing. You’ll know that the switch has been successfully made when I post a very silly piece early next week. That will serve as a test.
Programming Note
With another post by McArdle the insurance-mortality debate continues and may do so for some time. If you are interested in it and this blog has been your sole source for references to the contributions of others (Klein, McArdle, Drum, etc.) then you should take some action. I’m not going to continue to go post-for-post with the other bloggers on this. I’ve already spoken my mind on the matter, and I’ve facilitated the blog version of a first-class literature review (link to relevant posts). From here on out it would just be correcting folks’ (sometimes willful) misunderstandings and repeating myself. I’ve got better things to do.
Therefore, if you want to keep up with this one then either (a) subscribe to the blogs of others involved or (b) subscribe to my News & Links feed (described on my Subscribe page and visible in the far right sidebar). As I see things of relevance to this topic I will enter them into that feed.
This is not to say with certainty I will not post on this again. I’m just not committing to participate in every round. After all, there is vastly more to health reform, health economics, and health policy than this issue. It’s gotten far more attention than it deserves already.
Buzz Me
Google launched Buzz, which has been described as its version of Facebook. You can find me in Buzz and follow my blog posts and News & Links feed there (*). I still think RSS in Google Reader is way better. But to each his/her own. Buzz me if you like.
(*) If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see my Subscribe page.
Good Comments. Keep It Coming
I’ve noticed an uptick in the quantity and quality of comments. That’s great! The most important difference between a public blog and a secret diary is that the former invites comments, either directly on the site or on other blogs. If I didn’t want reactions I wouldn’t muse publicly.
Keep it coming. If you’ve never commented, give it a try (do it anonymously if you wish). If you’ve commented on something already, thank you. I read every one and respond to many. My hope is that someday the volume of comments is so large I can’t keep up. That will be one indication this blog is making a meaningful (if only brief) difference in people’s lives.
(And no, I do not have a secret diary.)
Spleen Venting Cometh
Christopher Dodd declares an early Groundhog Day: six more weeks of nothing on health reform. From Political Wire:
Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) now says Democrats “should take a break of up to six weeks in the health care debate to allow the caucus to regroup and refocus on how to move a bill forward,” reports CQ Politics.
Dodd said it will be up to President Obama to get health care legislation back on track, perhaps by taking “a breather for a month, six weeks, and quietly go back and say the door’s open again.”
Does pushing votes closer to the midterms sound like a smart way to resurrect a politically controversial idea? Not to me either. It is hard to see how the Democrats get serious on this when everything they say suggests otherwise. I’m not sure when the media is going to officially declare a time of death but it has got to be getting close. When that happens, I expect much venting of spleens.
That’s a good segue to next week’s theme on this blog. I’ve declared it Catharsis Week. I and a guest blogger (or two, or three if they agree to it) will vent our emotions over health reform politics. I normally keep my emotions in check on the blog and this will be a rare and brief exception. But if I don’t let them out I may strangle the groundhog. You (and the groundhog) have been warned.
Sometimes You Need a Blunt Object
Every so often I stumble on a blog with some decent content–entertaining or informative or both. Blunt Object is the one I found most recently (discovered when the blogger linked to my posts). Some Blunt Object posts on health care reform include thoughts similar to my own, except with more cursing. Give it a try.
My only beef is that I can’t find a way to contact the author except by leaving a comment. That’s too bad because I’d like to exchange e-mail. So, if Mr. Blunt Object guy/gal wants to offer a way to communicate I would. Up to him/her.
2009 Blog Revenue Donated to Haiti Relief
A minuscule trickle of money flows my way from this blog’s Google AdWords and Amazon.com book referrals. In 2009, the revenue from those sources was about $100.
Were this blog a corporation it would be not-for-profit because my policy is to donate every dollar above the small blog operating cost to charity. I don’t reserve any revenue as compensation for the hours (and hours and hours) I put into the blog. What I do here is either related to my work, for which I’m already paid, or is recreation.
In response to the crisis in Haiti, this year’s charity is the Partners in Health Stand with Haiti campaign. Partners in Health is a Boston based non-profit organization dedicated “to care for our patients, to alleviate the root causes of disease in their communities, and to share lessons learned around the world,” including in Haiti.
The direct link to the Partners in Health Stand with Haiti Campaign is this.
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