8
votes
Accepted
Economic policies to decrease obesity (would they be effective?)
Yes, sugar tax!
This is probably as controversial as tobacco tax was back in the days. If you walk through a supermarket, you will find that half of the food section is food full of sugar. Sugar is ...
- 1,661
8
votes
Accepted
Is climate change an economic question?
Climate change in itself, its measurement and the fact that it is happening, and modeling its speed or trying to discover its causes (e.g., carbon emissions, methane emissions and so on) is not an ...
- 54.4k
7
votes
Is my logic on taxation for this question legit?
The burden of taxation is shared among suppliers and demanders according to the price elasticities of supply and demand. The more elastic side carries less of the tax burden.
To understand this, note ...
- 6,128
6
votes
Accepted
Minimum wage vs wage subsdies
We could distinguish between two kinds of "wage subsidies":
A) The government pays to the firm part of the wage cost, usually social security fees.
B) The government pays to the employee a markup ...
- 33.4k
6
votes
Economic policies to decrease obesity (would they be effective?)
In any discussion of obesity-related policy, it helps to call out a couple of assumptions:
Assumption: A healthy lifestyle will reduce a person's weight.
Everyone and their brother "knows" this to ...
- 61
6
votes
Economic policies to decrease obesity (would they be effective?)
Pierre Dubois, Rachel Griffith, and Aviv Nevo have a nice and well-executed AER paper where they argue that differences in obesity rates across countries can be due to differences in food consumption ...
- 6,885
6
votes
Accepted
What are some good advanced level textbooks on public economics?
The best book in my opinion for your case is definitely Intermediate Public Economics by Jean Hindriks and Gareth D. Myles. It is often used as a standard text for public finance at your level and ...
- 6,128
6
votes
Why is the USA not capable to pay its debt?
The US is in a privileged position of producing a currency that people in other countries want to use (as reserve). There's even a French name for that. Anyway, a result of that is cheap credit for ...
- 3,918
5
votes
Accepted
Why is government debt level presented as ratio to GDP, not against government budget or revenue size?
The ratio of government debt to GDP is a useful indicator because, broadly, the larger a country's GDP, the larger is the tax revenue the government could potentially raise to service the debt while ...
- 8,311
5
votes
Is a universal basic income possible in the United States?
A new report by the Roosevelt Institute answers exactly that using a Keynesian, Stock-Flow-Consistent model calibrated to the US. According to their result, when distributional changes are considered, ...
- 8,581
5
votes
Why don't public transport networks have more routes to each terminal in order to reduce the number of transfers?
The people who do the planning do explicitly account for the value of time and convenience to transit users. At least, in all the systems I've worked on. (source: I have had jobs where I worked on ...
- 8,123
5
votes
Accepted
Nash equilibrium - mistake in proof of paper?
The objective is to show that, as long as $f'(n\hat\theta)\ne \alpha$, a firm can always engineer a package $(p',\hat\theta')=(p+\Delta p,\hat\theta+\Delta \hat{\theta})$ such that (i) a caring ...
- 887
5
votes
Accepted
Understanding an article in the BMJ about the sugar tax
A little background. The paper relates to a tax (known as the Soft Drinks Industry Levy) introduced by the UK in 2018 on some soft drinks, levied on manufacturers (not consumers), with the aim, ...
- 8,311
5
votes
Accepted
Pigouvian tax with general utility function
The first order condition for individual $a$ when the price of $y$ equals $p_y(1+t)$ is given by:
$$
\frac{\partial u_a}{\partial y_a} = p_y(1+t) \left(\frac{1}{p_x} \frac{\partial u_a}{\partial x_a} \...
- 10.2k
5
votes
Accepted
How can I show convexity of this value function?
Suppose that $u(C,l)=\sqrt{C}-l^2$ and $f(l,A)=\big(l+g(A)\big)^2$, where $g$ is any function of $A$ that is not convex.
Then $$u\big(f(l,A),l\big)=l+g(A)-l^2.$$
The optimal labor supply is given by $...
- 11.6k
4
votes
Why is capital income taxed differently than wage income?
There are two main reason for the difference in tax rates that I see from the literature.
First, some papers argue that the optimal tax rate on capital is zero. This is the famous "Chamley-Judd" ...
- 6,128
4
votes
Economic policies to decrease obesity (would they be effective?)
In "Uncommon Sense", by Gary Becker and Richard Posner, Posner, going off of Becker's comment, suggests that while a fat tax would be regressive, poverty and obesity are correlated more because of a ...
- 6,578
4
votes
Does the 2nd welfare theorem involve government intervention?
The second welfare theorem does not necessarily involve a government as such. It does not matter for the theorem who redistributes the resources. Nevertheless, in practice this will most likely often ...
- 6,128
3
votes
Is my logic on taxation for this question legit?
It depends on whether all the tickets are sold or not. If sold out, all the the tax burden is borne by the buyers. If not, then it's shared.
If sold out, buyers pay all the tax.
If all 39,000 ...
- 1,101
3
votes
Why do government jobs provide better benefits than industry jobs?
I'll describe in turn five potential explainations:
Risk aversion interacting with the tax code
Is this true when we control for worker attributes?
Lack of incentives for cost control
Solving ...
- 16.3k
3
votes
What benefits do governments receive from not eliminating debt?
I am quite surprised that none of the answers above have mentioned the classic Barro article "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth"
The way I understand it is that given that the utility function is ...
- 1,631
3
votes
Accepted
Effect of changing Non Labor Income on Consumption-Leisure problem
This has to do with the form of the utility function. Assume instead that,say, we had
$$U(c,l) = c^{1/2} - \frac{1}{2}l^2$$
Does now $R$ affect the labor-supplied decision?
Solve it and explore. ...
- 33.4k
3
votes
Accepted
Contest game: second order condition satisfied, but negative profits?
Well it says in the paper on p. 423:
"Thus the sufficiency assumption implies a unique pure strategy equilibrium. And if the sufficiency assumption is violated, at least one player will receive a ...
- 2,375
3
votes
Can a progressive marginal taxation be regressive in terms of average tax rate?
$$
\frac{\partial\frac{T(Y)}{Y}}{\partial Y}= \frac{T'(Y)}{Y} - \frac{T(Y)}{Y^2}
$$
This can only be smaller than 0 if
$$ T'(Y) < \frac{T(Y)}{Y} $$
In other words, the marginal tax rate needs ...
- 1,307
3
votes
Accepted
Equity-efficiency tradeoff examples
Publicly funded healthcare and social welfare schemes typically serve redistributive functions and therefore can be considered as promoting equity (among the well-off and the poor). At the same time, ...
- 15.3k
3
votes
Unions, right to work laws
For the googling part of your question:
In the context of US labor politics, "right-to-work laws" refers to
state laws that prohibit union security agreements between companies
and labor unions....
- 28.6k
3
votes
Accepted
The optimal tax rate
It does determine the optimum tax rate when the weighted average elasticity is constant.
If $e (1-\tau) = \frac{1-\tau}{z} \frac{dZ}{d(1-\tau)} = e$ there is no issue, because then regardless of a tax ...
- 54.4k
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