Knowledge that Transforms

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 constituted the most sweeping postwar change in the U.S. federal income tax. This paper considers what the Act accomplished and its implications for future tax policy. After a review of the Act itself, and why it happened, we consider the evidence of the Act's impact on economic activity and how this evidence squares with initial predictions. Where appropriate, we draw out how consideration of the impact of TRA86 has contributed to the development of the methodology of economic analysis. We conclude with an overall evaluation of the Act.

This article examines past evaluations of government training programs for the economically disadvantaged and offers an agenda for future research. It is found that government training programs are producing modest increases in earnings for adult men and women, but are probably not producing positive effects for youth. Future research must better document links between program-provided training and acquisition of valuable skills and must explore potential returns from increased scale. The recent adoption of random assignment has improved the accuracy of field evaluations but would benefit from an economic theory of evaluation to guide research into increasing training effectiveness.

In recent years there have been growing demands to make trade liberalization contingent on adoption of common labor and environmental standards. The straightforward economic answer is that this makes little sense: neither the gains from trade nor the gains from appropriate regulation are compromised if other countries impose standards that are weaker than your own. It is possible to offer second-bet economic rationales for harmonization, but these are empirically unconvincing. The only serious argument in favor or regulation is political: that regulation which is in the national interest may not be politically feasible unless other countries do the same.

The deterioration of economic performance in Sweden from about 1970 was to some extent result of a number of exogenous shocks and unnecessary policy mistakes. It was, however, also related to basic changes in economic and social system in Sweden in late 1960s and early 1970, when government spending, taxes, and regulations started to expand dramatically. It is also argued in paper that problematic political, economic, and social mechanisms had become embedded in long-term dynamics of system itself. These various experiences are background for recent reforms and retreats of the Swedish experiment.

This book demonstrates alternatives to the lecture and chalkboard approach that dominates the teaching of economics, providing a range of innovative teaching techniques and examples aimed at engaging undergraduates in the learning of economics.

This article reviews the evidence on cross-national comparisons of earnings and income inequality in OECD countries. It begins with a series of stylized facts which are then examined and supported by recent studies in the field. Economic, demographic, institutional and policy-related influences on earnings and income distribution are reviewed. The paper concludes with a call for more work on empirically testable structural models of household income distribution.

This paper traces the time series (Growth of Firms) tradition in the study of market structure, and looks at how recent studies on entry and the size distribution of firms have modified thinking in this area.

The event study is an important research tool in economics and finance. The goal of an event study is to measure the effects of an economic event on the value of firms. Event study methods exploit the fact that, given rationality in the marketplace, the effects of an event will be reflected immediately in security prices. Thus the impact can be measured by examining security prices surrounding the event. In this paper event study methods are described including some of the potential complications. An example is included to illustrate the approach.

We develop a method for measuring the foresight agents have. We first dichotomize an agent’s information at current date t into knowledge up to date t 1 f and expectations after t 1 f. We then form a residual-based test statistic that allows us to compare prediction errors for econometric models based on different values of f. We illustrate the method, examining investment around tax reforms to measure the foresight firms have about tax policy. In this illustration, current investment appears to reflect currently available information but little foresight other than foresight of enacted policy changes.

The correlation between instruments and explanatory variables is a key determinant of the performance of the instrumental variables estimator. The R-squared from regressing the explanatory variable on the instrument vector is a useful measure of relevance in univariate models, but can be misleading when there are multiple endogenous variables. This paper proposes a computationally simple partial R- squared measure of instrument relevance for multivariate models.