A crash course in tax incidence, or why Seattle's proposed "progressive...
Think about the sales tax for a moment and I suspect you'll agree with the following two statements:The sales tax is regressive, meaning that lower-income families devote the highest share of their...
View ArticleThe miser and the townspeople: a contemporary fable
Once there was a wealthy miser who lived outside a crowded town. Many of the townspeople worked for the miser -- more and more of them, in fact.The miser angered the townspeople. The miser collected...
View ArticleLet's address homelessness with a property tax, King County
[This post originally appeared on May 11th, 2018 when Seattle's City Council was considering levying an Employee Hours Tax to fund services and housing for the homeless. Since then, the Council...
View ArticleThe grad student labor market
Graduate student employees at the University of Washington are on strike today. Represented by the United Auto Workers local 4121, the students have formed a picket line not far from my office window....
View ArticleReflections on Tenure V: Am I Ready to be Promoted to Full Professor?
Five years ago I wrote a series of blog posts reflecting on my time as a member of Duke's committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure. This committee drew a collection of senior scholars from...
View ArticleOn the monetization of expertise
Ten years ago I received a call from the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. They were in the midst of pretrial proceedings involving a prominent landlord in the Los Angeles area, who...
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Did Sherwin Rosen (accidentally) cause the rise in income inequality?
In 2003 Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez introduced one of the more famous graphs in modern economics. Since updated to 2017, it looks like this:Described verbally, the graph shows the time series of...
View ArticleReflections on Tenure Appendix A: Notes for Junior Economists
This is a brief extension to theseriesofpostsdrawing upon my experiences as a member of a University-level promotion and tenure committee. In that role I reviewed about 200 tenure dossiers, including...
View ArticleWhy PAPRSS?
Today I launched a new website, www.paprss.org, "Public Access Peer Review for the Social Sciences." Here are the problems it seeks to solve.Historically, there were three fundamental rationales for...
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Can't Afford Your Apartment? Rent Control Won't Help. Here's Why.
In San Francisco and its immediate suburbs, the typical two-bedroom apartment rents for over $3,000 per month. Working a full-time job at the city's $15/hour minimum wage, if we set aside both...
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