Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both... more Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The available data from schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food processing plants, hair stylists, and airlines show employers adopting mitigation protocols in the spring of 2020. Coincident with the adoption, infection rates in workplaces typically dropped from well above household rates to well below. When this occurs, the sign of the disease externality from participating in large organizations changes from negative to positive, even while individuals continue to have an incentive to avoid large organizations due to the prevention costs they impose on members. Rational cooperative prevention sometimes results in infectious-disease patterns that are opposite of predictions from classical epidemiology. ...
We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economic... more We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economics. QE dates back to Tarski’s work in the 1940s with software to perform it dating to the 1970s. There is a great body of work considering its application in science and engineering but we show here how it can also find application in the social sciences. We explain how many suggested theorems in economics could either be proven, or even have their hypotheses shown to be inconsistent, automatically; and describe the application of this in both economics education and research. We describe a bank of QE examples gathered from economics literature and note the structure of these are, on average, quite different to those occurring in the computer algebra literature. This leads us to suggest a new incremental QE approach based on result memorization of commonly occurring generic QE results.
We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economic... more We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economics. QE dates back to Tarski's work in the 1940s with software to perform it dating to the 1970s. There is a great body of work considering its application in science and engineering but we show here how it can also find application in the social sciences. We explain how many suggested theorems in economics could either be proven, or even have their hypotheses shown to be inconsistent, automatically; and describe the application of this in both economics education and research. We describe a bank of QE examples gathered from economics literature and note the structure of these are, on average, quite different to those occurring in the computer algebra literature. This leads us to suggest a new incremental QE approach based on result memorization of commonly occurring generic QE results.
166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain o... more 166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old-age Social Security as a public program? In the first part of the paper, we document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply, pay-as-you-go features, intergenerational redistribution, benefits which are increasing functions of lifetime earnings and not means-tested. The rest of the paper discusses various positive theories of Social Security and compares each of them with the empirical regularities uncovered in the first part. We partition theories into three groups: “political”, “efficiency” and “narrative” theories. We explore three political theories: the majority rational voting model (with its two versions: “the elderly as the leaders of a winning coalition with the poor” and the “once and for all election” model), the “time-intensive model of political competition” and the “tax...
Is the government a mechanism by which the rich help the poor ? Although often argued to be selfe... more Is the government a mechanism by which the rich help the poor ? Although often argued to be selfevident by citizens and scholars alike, merit motives have implications which seem less understood. We argue that, when the rich value consumption of merit goods by the poor, then public policy redistributes income in order to create distortions – the converse of the conventional efficiencyredistribution tradeoff in public finance in which distortions are tolerated in order to redistribute income. We show how such efficiency-enhancing public policy distorts the behavior of the poor; may involve regulatory and fiscal policy offsetting each other; is less progressive than appears from existing empirical incidence analysis that only tracks resource flows between the private and public sector; and involves in-kind transfers of services and goods rather than cash. We discuss why the largest programs on the federal and local level in the US – including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Public Schooling – seem consistent with these implications of merit good motives. Quantitative analyses of Social Security shows that for conventional parameter values in standard models of savings, the program may be substantially more regressive than suggested by existing measures of incidence; there may be no amount of government provided retirement benefits that are large enough to compensate the poor for foregoing as little as a few percent of their working life consumption!
Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both... more Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The available data from schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food processing plants, hair stylists, and airlines show employers adopting mitigation protocols in the spring of 2020. Coincident with the adoption, infection rates in workplaces typically dropped from well above household rates to well below. When this occurs, the sign of the disease externality from participating in large organizations changes from negative to positive, even while individuals continue to have an incentive to avoid large organizations due to the prevention costs they impose on members. Rational cooperative prevention sometimes results in infectious-disease patterns that are opposite of predictions from classical epidemiology. ...
We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economic... more We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economics. QE dates back to Tarski’s work in the 1940s with software to perform it dating to the 1970s. There is a great body of work considering its application in science and engineering but we show here how it can also find application in the social sciences. We explain how many suggested theorems in economics could either be proven, or even have their hypotheses shown to be inconsistent, automatically; and describe the application of this in both economics education and research. We describe a bank of QE examples gathered from economics literature and note the structure of these are, on average, quite different to those occurring in the computer algebra literature. This leads us to suggest a new incremental QE approach based on result memorization of commonly occurring generic QE results.
We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economic... more We consider the use of Quantifier Elimination (QE) technology for automated reasoning in economics. QE dates back to Tarski's work in the 1940s with software to perform it dating to the 1970s. There is a great body of work considering its application in science and engineering but we show here how it can also find application in the social sciences. We explain how many suggested theorems in economics could either be proven, or even have their hypotheses shown to be inconsistent, automatically; and describe the application of this in both economics education and research. We describe a bank of QE examples gathered from economics literature and note the structure of these are, on average, quite different to those occurring in the computer algebra literature. This leads us to suggest a new incremental QE approach based on result memorization of commonly occurring generic QE results.
166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain o... more 166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old-age Social Security as a public program? In the first part of the paper, we document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply, pay-as-you-go features, intergenerational redistribution, benefits which are increasing functions of lifetime earnings and not means-tested. The rest of the paper discusses various positive theories of Social Security and compares each of them with the empirical regularities uncovered in the first part. We partition theories into three groups: “political”, “efficiency” and “narrative” theories. We explore three political theories: the majority rational voting model (with its two versions: “the elderly as the leaders of a winning coalition with the poor” and the “once and for all election” model), the “time-intensive model of political competition” and the “tax...
Is the government a mechanism by which the rich help the poor ? Although often argued to be selfe... more Is the government a mechanism by which the rich help the poor ? Although often argued to be selfevident by citizens and scholars alike, merit motives have implications which seem less understood. We argue that, when the rich value consumption of merit goods by the poor, then public policy redistributes income in order to create distortions – the converse of the conventional efficiencyredistribution tradeoff in public finance in which distortions are tolerated in order to redistribute income. We show how such efficiency-enhancing public policy distorts the behavior of the poor; may involve regulatory and fiscal policy offsetting each other; is less progressive than appears from existing empirical incidence analysis that only tracks resource flows between the private and public sector; and involves in-kind transfers of services and goods rather than cash. We discuss why the largest programs on the federal and local level in the US – including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Public Schooling – seem consistent with these implications of merit good motives. Quantitative analyses of Social Security shows that for conventional parameter values in standard models of savings, the program may be substantially more regressive than suggested by existing measures of incidence; there may be no amount of government provided retirement benefits that are large enough to compensate the poor for foregoing as little as a few percent of their working life consumption!
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