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Paul Krugman, won the Nobel in Economics several years ago for his work mainly in international trade.  He is an economics professor both at Princeton and at the London Scho0l of Economics, as well as a noted New York Times op-ed columnist.  Here,  Krugman asks why there is no real little political clamor for tariffs and quotas on foreign goods.

Tyler Cowen,  a professor of economics at George Mason University, and also a columnist for the New York Times, answers Krugman on his Blog he writes with Alex Taborrok, called the Marginal RevolutionHere is Cowen’s response.  

-MC

 

On Monday, we had Dr. Steven Sheffrin here to talk about our national government’s debt and our annual deficits that add to that debt.  He mentioned that other countries seem to get in trouble with creditors when their debt to GDP ratio gets to about 90%.  Well, after listening to this little story on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” you will see that we just stepped away from that limit a bit, by changing the way we calculate GDP.  As I mentioned in my Econ 255 class, we only count final goods in those GDP calculations.  However, it was recently announced that certain intangibles, that were once considered intermediate goods and services, are now being shifted over to the final goods column as investment.  Research and Development, software, and other intellectual property production will be considered investment goods, which count in GDP, instead of as intermediate goods, which do not.

This change in GDP accounting is not such a sudden change and has been discussed for a few years now.  For instance, here is a Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA—these are the folks who do our GDP accounting) paper by Ana M. Aizcorbe, Carol E. Moylan, and Carol A. Robbins from January, 2009, discussing the issue.

Of course, as you see in the story, there will really not be in big jump in GDP as a result because the BEA is going back through all previous years and recalculating GDP for those years as well.  And I don’t think creditors will buy the new change as a reason to delay downgrading our debt, either.

-MC

As you know, Monday, Steve Sheffrin will talk to the class about “Deficits and Debt.”  Take a look at this April 10th Times-Picayune op-ed article on Jindahl’s plan to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a sales tax.  Sheffrin co-wrote the piece with Tim Ryan, Economics Professor and former Chancellor of UNO, and LSU Economics Professor, Jim Richardson.

-MC

This past November, 26th, I posted the following short piece to this blog.

For several years, I and others have pointed to Intrade.com as a premier forecasting tool, a betting market or prediction market.  Take a look at this blog’s archives in the category “Prediction Markets.”  Intrade has been far more accurate at predicting elections than any polls, where people share information by betting, or setting a buying or selling price to trade at based on the information that they have.  Stossel did a 20/20 report on Intrade some years back where he explains why it works so well, a video you can see here.  It looks as if today, Americans are being forbidden from taking part in this market, from sharing in our knowledge, by our federal government.  Stossel explains how our government closed Intrade to Americans in this article.  It is not only a shame, but what our government has done here should be a crime.

Well, it seems as if things have deteriorated since.  With such a drop in trading activity from the loss of the US market, Intrade has been forced to shut down, as Adriene Hill reports at Marketplace (I was asked for an interviewed for her article, but I could not respond before her deadline).

There is an idea in financial economics literature called the “efficient markets hypothesis.”  The idea is that markets incorporate all of the public information about asset values and do so immediately.  You can read a bit more on efficient markets here.  Intrade was a public betting and futures market (and so, financial regulators insisted on regulating Intrade as a futures market) based in Ireland.  Betting on events such as US presidential elections, who would win American Idol or which movie would win the best picture Oscar, the betting odds adjusted to reflect the beliefs of the traders.  Intrade was well-known as an accurate predictor of elections, far better than any of the polls were, as it took into account all of the polls plus other information not polled, such as the get-out-the-vote efforts.  Intrade did not predict things such as Supreme Court rulings as well.  Had it continued in existence, there would surely have been a betting market on who would be the next Pope, though again, it probably would not have done that well.  Intrade was a great tool for studying expectations and how people’s expectations were affected by events in the market.  Both academicians and political commenters relied on Intrade trading prices.

Even with Intrade gone, there is another betting market for things such as elections, the Iowa Electronic Markets.  Rebecca Morton, now with the Political Science Department at New York University, former Nicholls State economist, did research with the Iowa Electronic Markets while she taught at Iowa State.  While Intrade has ended, new markets will be created and will take Intrade’s place.  While the loss of Intrade has increased the cost of important information in our society, a replacement will surely come into existence soon.

-MC

This week’s Nicholl’s Worth page one headline reads “Will it pass?”  Pauling Wilson’s article having that headline concerns a referendum before students on raising student fees by $84 per semester for a full-time student to support Nicholls athletics.  Here, I do not address the normative question, ”should students pass the referendum?” but rather the more positive question asked in the headline,  “will it pass?”  My short answer is: “more than likely.”  But my longer answer, one that I hope to prove instructive, provides the “why” to my answer.

Before going any further, I need to mention that Chris Cox and I wrote the 2004 study, “Economic Impact of Nicholls State University Athletics.”  My daughter and my sister were both Intercollegiate athletes here in Louisiana.  I have another son, still in high school, who is likely to be a college athlete.   I have another son who has received a very helpful band and music scholarship funded, I am sure, somewhat through his university’s athletic department—so did I, my sister and my brother.  In addition, I have had some excellent student athletes in my classes, and am sure I have some now.  The referendum before Nicholls students is to help support just such athletes and support students.  I am not writing this post against athletics.  Instead, I am using the referendum as an example to make a more general point.

Sometimes among professors, there is little interaction across discipline lines.  When this happens, there are interesting ideas from one area that could be applied from one area to another, but the lack of communication stifles this potential progress.  However, when there is a cross-cultivation of ideas, it leads to a better understanding of those ideas and the generation of new ones.  More and more, as academics discuss ideas across traditional discipline lines, rewarding insights are often discovered.    For instance, the academic study of voting and elections, once the sole province of political scientists, is increasingly being studied by academicians in other areas, just as political scientists contribute to other fields.

One example of this cross-cultivation is a sub-discipline of economics and political science called “public choice” or “collective choice” or sometimes more generally as “rational choice.”  Building on economists’ idea of rational decision making, the focus is on the individual’s decision to participate in the political process in one way or another, as a voter, as a candidate, or even as a campaign contributor.   I should probably also confess to being a steady contributor to this area of the area of public choice, having been a student of the founders of this area, presenting and discussing conference papers, reviewing articles for publication and writing some myself, with  about 4 or 5 directly related to this post.

The economist’s idea of rational decision making is that people do things that are in their best interest, as they see their best interest.  This means that a person will do things that increase their benefits more than they increase their costs, when the marginal or additional benefit of an action outweighs the marginal or additional cost of the action.

When the outcome of an action is probabilistic, because it depends on other things happening, such as a person surviving another year given that a person has some surgery or your candidate winning an election given that you voted for that person, probabilities have to be introduced to determine the value of the event.  For instance, suppose you win a dollar if a tossed coin comes up heads.  Then the value of tossing the coin is worth about dollar times the probability of the coin coming up heads, or $0.50 per toss (assuming that the coin has a 50/50 chance of coming up heads).  This probability-influenced value is called “expected value.”

Anthony Downs develops a rational-choice or economic model of the decision to vote in his 1957 book, An economic theory of democracy, using this idea of “expected value.” Downs’ model was modified by William Riker and Peter Ordeshook in a 1970 paper.  The resulting model expresses the decision to participate in a vote using a simple equation:

V = PB – C + D, where V is the value of voting, P is the probability that your vote will change the outcome of the election (by either breaking or creating a tie) and C is the cost of the act of voting, and D is the voter’s value of voting because of a sense of duty or social pressure that has nothing to do with winning or losing.  If your vote creates or breaks a tie, you are better off by the difference in the values of your candidate winning and your candidate losing.  In most elections, even elections such as a campus election, the probability of creating or breaking a tie is usually so small that it may as well be zero, so that really matters will be the C and D terms.  A person will vote if the cost of doing so is less than the value of voting due to duty or due to the social pressure of voting.  Usually, for most people, both the costs of voting and the costs of not voting (D) are rather small and of similar sizes, so some vote and others do not.

Economists and political scientists have since used this framework to analyze various sorts of votes, in particular, the workings of special interest politics.  Suppose a small group in the electorate stand to be the recipients of a transfer from the others, such as money collected from the entire group and given to a small subset.  The small subset of voters, the recipients, stand to gain a large amount if the vote passes.  If these recipients know each other, they will surely pressure each other to be sure to vote, and almost all of them cast their votes.  Those who are against the transfer see that each loses a little and that it is difficult to know who else might be against it and difficult to use social pressure to get others to join your ballot protest against the transfer.

Much of the larger majority who stand to lose from the transfer do not bother voting because they rightfully see their one vote as powerless to stop the transfer.  However, almost all of the members of the minority who stand to gain by the election, make it to the polls to vote for the transfer.  The result is that the special interest voters get the transfer they were voting for.  One way of expressing this idea is that people vote for a proposal when the benefits of that proposal are concentrated on them and the costs of the proposal are spread out.  If the costs of the proposal are concentrated and the benefits are spread out, people are more likely to oppose the proposal.

Consider this, almost all of the 400 or so student athletes and support students will vote for this referendum as will many of their friends.  The overall turnout is likely to be similar to what it has been in many other Nicholls student elections, very small.  In the future, as in the past, I am sure that students will complain about the high level of student fees and will continue to let such referendums pass without much opposition.  While I cannot predict with certainty that the referendum will pass, I am sure that the proportion of yes votes will be much higher than in general student population.

Two strategies come to mind to increase participation to reduce the power of special interest.  One, restrict proposals to raise student fees to once per year that should be during the fall semester.  If there are elections that draw voters more, a referendum to raise fees should be on the same ballot as other matters that draw a lot of voters.  This is along the lines of the discussion in a paper I did in 1996, where we suggested that special tax elections were almost always special interest tax election and tax elections should occur in general elections, not in special elections.  Two, another strategy is to reduce the cost of voting by making it much more convenient, such as holding elections electronically, using the internet, rather than to require physical presence for voting.  I am happy to report that this is just what the SGA has done, allowing students to vote by going to https://acs.nicholls.edu/NSUVoting/aspxLogin.aspx.

-MC

A few weeks ago the Nicholls Worth ran this article about Jindal’s plan to change the structure of taxation in Louisiana, moving away from income taxes and toward sales taxes.   More recently, more details of the governor’s tax proposals have been released, as we see in this article from the Baton Rouge Advocate.  In particular, notice that after fighting against keeping a 4-cent per pack temporary tax on cigarettes two years ago, Jindal has now proposed almost quadrupling the state’s cigarette tax to $1.41 per pack.  Of course, this time the increase in the cigarette tax is part of a plan to get rid of the income tax in the state.

A discussion of cigarette taxes and revenues seems to be especially in order, since we are now discussing something called the “price elasticity of demand” and the “income elasticity of demand” in two of my classes.  As it happens, I have done some research on estimating the effects of state cigarette taxes (for instance, see here and here).

Basic economic theory suggests that any unit tax (so many cents per unit, not based on selling price) on a specific good, as we see on cigarettes and beer, and we saw in our auction, the tax should either be passed on to buyers in higher prices, with sellers paying the rest of the tax in terms of the price received (after-tax price or price minus the tax).  Since the supply to any single state is a very small part of the total supply of cigarettes, state supply is completely flat and any state cigarette tax is completely passed on to buyers.

In Figure 1 we see the two types of demands noting that the X-axis measures the amount of cigarettes demanded in state j (where j could stand for any state) on a per capita basis, or total quantity demanded divided by the number of people in the state).  Demand 1 shows the demand for cigarettes in a state when prices in that state change, holding the prices of cigarettes in all other states constant, which is what happens when a state changes its tax rates while other states do not.  Demand 2 shows what happens when prices in all states increase the same, as is the case when the tax on cigarettes changes, affecting all states the same.   If the state tax on cigarettes increases, the supply curve shifts up by the amount of the tax, and so, with a flat supply curve, the supply shifts up in the price direction by the amount of the tax, resulting in the price changing (dP = change in price = tax) by the amount of the tax increase.

Figure 1.  Demand when prices rise together in all states and when prices rise in just one state

 fig 1

From Figure 1, using “d” to represent “change in,” b = inverse slope or dQ/dP of Demand 1 and a = inverse slope of Demand 2, or dQ/dP.  The coefficients “a” and “b” are estimated from data on cigarette, prices, cigarette taxes and cigarette sales state by state.  So, a state tax of the amount dP (dP stands here for change in price) will cause the quantity demanded to fall in the state by b*dP, where b is the change in quantity from a one-cent change in price along Demand 1 (what we can call the “state only” demand curve)—note that the change in Quantity Demanded, dQ = b*dP).    Based on Demand 2, where all states’ prices change together (the “all together” demand), we see that increases in cigarette prices because of the tax reduce consumption of cigarettes in the state by a*dP.  So the remaining reduction in cigarette sales in the state will be (b-a)*dP or s*dP.  This is the amount of sales reduced, not because people are cutting back on smoking, but because people are no longer buy cigarettes in this state, but buy them elsewhere.  Remember, the price increase of dP reduces the quantity demanded in the state only by a*dP.   So, we find the effect of a state tax hike in changing cross-state purchases by subtracting the slope coefficient a from the slope coefficient b.

Figure 2 shows the result of a federal or nation-wide cigarette tax increase from $.39 per pack to $1.01 per pack in 2009 as a movement along the blue demand curve, the all-together demand curve.  This all-together demand curve corresponds to Demand 2 in Figure 1.  If this increase in federal cigarette taxes of $.62 per pack is fully passed on to buyers in higher prices, the federal tax increase would boost the state average price for $4.08 to $4.70.  Here, the demand curve in blue, the “all-together” demand, corresponds to Demand 2 in Figure 1, the demand for cigarettes in the state when prices in all states go up together.  The two red demands show the demand when just this one state is raising its taxes, the state-only demand, corresponding to Demand 1 in Figure 1.  The lower state-only demand is the one for which the federal tax is only $.39 per pack, while the higher state-only demand is the one when the federal tax is $1.08  per pack.

Figure 2. Cigarette demand with elasticity estimates

fig 2

The state’s tax revenue gains from a state cigarette hike will be the amount of that tax hike times the number of units purchased after that tax hike, which is the rectangle labeled as the “Revenue rectangle.”  Notice that since the federal tax hike will reduce sales in the state, the same state tax hike generates less state revenue than before the federal tax hike.

The price elasticity of demand for the All-together demand is -0.296.  The price elasticity of demand for the state-only demand when state prices start at $4.08 is -1.085, but is -1.25 when the state price starts at $4.70.  The income elasticity of demand is estimated to be -0.58, meaning that across states, cigarettes are inferior goods.

Figure 3 shows the relationship between a given tax hike in Louisiana and the revenues gained by the state at different tax rate hikes.  Comparing the revenues to those in 2008, which we see as the red dotted line, the upper curve in blue shows the predicted gross revenues for cigarette taxes in Louisiana for various tax hikes (from along the horizontal axis).  Gross revenue is about total collections and has not taken the costs of collection and enforcement into effect.

Figure 3. Predicted Gross Revenues from Various State Cigarette Tax Hikes in Louisiana

fig 3

There are two points worth noting in Figure 3.  The first is that the revenues are predicted to grow with the size of the tax hikes, but that growth is at a decreasing rate.  We see that with blue and dashed green lines which have positive but falling slopes. The other point is that the state revenue gains from a given tax hike are lower after the federal tax hike than before it.

A last point to note is one that seems a contradiction from what we have seen with elasticities and firm revenues and elasticities and state tax revenues that we see here.  Notice from Figure 2, both state only demands are in the elastic range.  This means that an increase in price when demand is in the elastic range would result in lower revenues for sellers.  Yet, when taxes push prices up, they increase state tax revenues, as we see with the two Revenue rectangles.  Why is it that tax revenues go up even though the demand is elastic?  The first person to correctly answer this will get an extra half point for the answer and gets to earn a half point more from the blogs than other students.

-MC

February is over, and so is Black History Month.  Too bad. I think all of you should know who Paul Robeson was.  Have you ever heard the song, “Old Man River?” On first hearing, you might think that such song by a Black man is somewhat a betrayal to African Americans and the Civil Rights cause.  Well, I would be careful to question this man’s choice of roles.  First, a bit about this remarkable man. Robeson was, in my opinion, the 20th century Renaissance Man.  In some ways, he did it about all.  He attended Rutgers where he played football and was named an All-American.  He also lettered in several other sports, won awards for his oratory skill, and was named class valedictorian.

After graduation, he first entered law school at NYU and then transferred to Columbia, and played for the NFL while working on his law degree.  He finished law school, acted in musical productions in New York and later played Othello in London.  He went on to the silver screen in movies such as Show Boat.  He also released several albums using that wonderful bass voice of his.

He was also a large figure in the early Civil Rights Movement, but was also a communist.  While I disagree with his economic philosophy, he was unapologetic about any of his stances.  McCarthyism took its toll on his career.  He could have denounced his positions to save his career, but he did not.  He started a small publication in Harlem criticizing US policy.  Read about Paul Robeson here on Wikipedia.

-MC

Here is a thoughtful critique of the President’s minimum wage proposal, and this is from his former Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer that appeared in the New York Times on 3-2-13.  Of course, a few days ago, I posted this piece on the minimum wage here on Bastiat’s Bastions.  So, even one of the President’s most widely respected advisers, a long-time liberal economist, says there are better ways to help the poor, if that is the goal.

-MC

During Prohibition of the twenties and thirties, Al Capone made Chicago the center of booze smuggling, as he brought in so much whiskey from Canada, because he could sell it for a higher price in the U.S. where it was prohibited, than he paid for it in Canada.  Now, Chicago is once again becoming a center for smuggling, but this time it is cigarettes.

This St. Louis Post-Dispatch article tells us that that city is raising the tax on cigarettes by a $1 so that the total city, county, and state tax is $6.67 per pack, bringing the price of a pack of cigarettes to almost $11 per pack.  The federal tax on cigarettes now stands at $1.01 per pack.  In addition to those taxes on cigarettes is price component of well over a $1 per pack that is being charged by the cigarette manufacturers to pay the state tobacco settlements, a payment that is based on the number of packs sold in that state (and so, part of the companies’ marginal costs).

You can see the various taxes paid across the states before the increase in Chicago’s city taxes here, from Tobacco Free Kids.

What should be noted is that the tax in Missouri is only $0.17 per pack, though many Missouri counties and cities have small local taxes on cigarettes.  Still, this means that a pack of cigarettes in Chicago will have a tax on them of $6.50 higher in Chicago than in many places around Hannibal, MO, only about 300 miles away.  $6.50 may not be enough to drive 300 miles, but consider that a carton of cigarettes is $65 higher in taxes in Chicago than most places in Missouri, and a van could probably hold a thousand cartons, the incentive for cigarette smuggling is powerful.

Many in favor of higher state cigarette taxes cite the health benefits of taxes in lowering tobacco consumption, but the effect of state taxes is smaller than many seem to think.  While state tax increases do lower the sales of cigarettes in those states (law of demand), much of the drop in sales in the state is because of increased incentives to trade across borders.  In 1995, a paper of mine came out in the National Tax Review where I developed a technique for estimating the effect that an increase in state cigarette tax has increasing the cross-border sales of cigarettes.  What I found was that about 80% of any decline in state cigarette sales because of a tax increase were replaced by cigarettes purchased from other states and only 20% of the reduction in sales were from reductions in smoking.

While the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article cited above suggests that some of the revenues will be devoted to increased enforcement effort, I think even more will be needed.

-MC

A few weeks ago, while many in south Louisiana were celebrating Mardi Gras, President Obama delivered his State of the Union address to the Congress and to the nation.  In it, he not only remarked about where he thought we were as a nation, but also, where he wanted to lead us in several areas.  One policy he mentioned was to increase the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $9.00 per hour over the next three years (listen to a National Public Radio Discussion of the minimum wage proposal here).

While this sounds like a good idea, could there be a downside?

The French economist and writer, Frederick Bastiat, the namesake for this blog, noted in a famous essay of his, “What is seen and what is not seen,”

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

What is “not seen” are the unintended consequences.

Another way of thinking about this is that we need to be thoughtful and good “positive” economists and not just “normative” economists.

Raising the minimum wage puts a higher floor on wages, raising the price for labor while not raising the value to the employers, the demanders of labor, or reducing the supply of labor.  It changes the price while not changing the values, the demand or the supply.

Employers especially retailers, when faced with a higher minimum wage, cut the hours of their operations as some time periods that used to bring in more money than the cost of those operations in those periods as labor costs rise.  Employers also shift to substitutes for low-skilled workers, such as more productive and better paid workers.  At the same time, a higher minimum wage brings more people into the labor market.   Raising the minimum wage, then, pushes down the amount of labor demanded while it increases the amount of labor supplied, causing a surplus, or a glut of low-skilled, low-educated, and mostly younger workers.  A glut of workers also goes by the name, “unemployment.”

Higher minimum wages also make going to work seem relatively more attractive than staying in a boring high school, leading to more drop outs.  With higher unemployment due to the minimum wage, it is harder to accumulate job experience.  Even though there is a limited “training” minimum  wage, that training minimum wage goes up when the minimum wage goes up.  With it more expensive to train workers, employers do less on-the-job training.  The very things that make a person more in demand as a worker, more education, more job experience and more on-the-job training, are all reduced, so some people may get higher wages, but now they will have greater trouble moving beyond minimum wage.

The minimum wage also increases racial and other discrimination in the workplace.  Suppose there is no minimum wage, or it is below the equilibrium wage.  Then, only the most temporary unemployment exists and the number looking for jobs just matches the number of jobs.  In that case, if a racist employer refuses to hire certain qualified (for the job) workers just because of their race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, he would either have to pay more for his “kind of workers,” or he would have to leave some jobs unfilled, because there just aren’t enough workers applying for his jobs.  So, with no meaningful minimum wage, a racist employer would find that there are high costs consequences to behaving in a racist manner in the job market.

But what happens when the minimum wage is raised above the equilibrium level, when unemployment begins to hit the low-skilled, low-educated, younger workers?  When there are more and more people to pick from for only a few jobs, an employer with racist tendencies can behave like a racist, hiring only his preferred type of worker, reducing the “marginal cost” of racist employment practices, increasing racist hiring.

Racial discrimination in hiring increases in another way as well, in the form of “unintentional discrimination.”  Here is what happens.  When the minimum wage is high enough to cause unemployment in the way described above, young workers with few skills and who have not completed high school find it very difficult to find jobs.  In these cases, the workers with good connections, what some call “social capital,” perhaps parents with friends of employers, find it easier to get a job than those who have few such connections.   “Who you know” becomes more and more valuable.  This also reduces the incentive to acquire as much “what you know,” making increases in pay beyond minimum wage even more difficult.

In the NPR discussion mentioned above, Kevin Hassett suggests that the minimum wage, while a poor way to help the poor, is a way that does not involve raising government spending or reducing taxes.  What we should notice is that there is a somewhat public purpose to raising the minimum wage, but the cost of doing so, higher unemployment of some, higher prices for consumers, lower profits for job creators, are really hidden taxes.

Perhaps, if we want to help the poor, we should do so in a manner that the costs of doing so are transparent and not so hidden.  Hiding the costs of collective action is just not ethical.  There are other ways of helping the poor that might just work better, as Hassett suggested in the NPR discussion above.

-MC

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