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11. The Millennials' Transition from School-to-Work

Author:
Yuet-Yee Linda Wong and Audra J. Bowlus
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Western University
Abstract:
We present the first study of the high school-to-work transition for American Millennial males and females. Using data from the PSID Transition to Adulthood from 2005-2011, we estimate the Burdett and Mortensen (1998) model and study changes between Generation X and Millennials. We find convergence in racial differences in transition patterns across the generations and in gender earnings by the Great Recession. These patterns are driven by a large decline in search efficiencies for white males. Finally, we show the labor market deteriorated for high school graduates prior to, with a further decline during, the Great Recession.
Topic:
Economics, Education, Global Recession, Human Capital, Labor Market, and Productivity
Political Geography:
United States

12. Optimal Contracting with Altruistic Agents: A Structural Model of Medicare Payments for Dialysis Drugs

Author:
Martin Gaynor, Nirav Mehta, and Seth Richards-Shubik
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Western University
Abstract:
We study physician agency and optimal payment policy in the context of an expensive medication used in dialysis care. Using Medicare claims data we estimate a structural model of treatment decisions, in which physicians differ in their altruism and marginal costs, and this heterogeneity is unobservable to the government. In a novel application of nonlinear pricing methods, we theoretically characterize the optimal unrestricted contract in this screening environment with multidimensional heterogeneity. We combine these results with the estimated model to construct the optimal contract and simulate counterfactual outcomes. The optimal contract is a flexible fee-for-service contract, which pays for reported treatments but uses variable marginal payments instead of constant reimbursement rates, resulting in substantial health improvements and reductions in costs. Our structural approach also yields important qualitative findings, such as rejecting the optimality of any linear contract, and may be employed more broadly to analyze a variety of applications.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Health, Health Care Policy, Human Capital, Productivity, and Medicare
Political Geography:
United States

13. The EITC and Maternal Time Use: More Time Working and Less Time with Kids?

Author:
Jacob Bastian and Lance Lochner
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for Human Capital and Productivity (CHCP), Western University
Abstract:
Parents spend considerable time and resources investing in their children's development. Given evidence that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) aects maternal labor supply, we investigate how the EITC aects a broad array of time-use activities, focusing on the amount and nature of time spent with children. Using 2003-2018 time-use data, we nd that federal and state EITC expansions increase maternal work time, which reduces time devoted to home production, leisure, and time with children. However, for children of all ages, almost none of the reduction comes from time devoted to investment activities, such as active learning and development activities.
Topic:
Economics, Labor Issues, Children, Women, Income Inequality, Tax Systems, Human Capital, Family, and Productivity
Political Geography:
United States

14. Global giants and local stars: How changes in brand ownership affect competition

Author:
Vanessa Alviarez, Keith Head, and Thierry Mayer
Publication Date:
11-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
We assess the consequences for consumers in 76 countries of multinational acquisitions in beer and spirits. Outcomes depend on how changes in ownership affect markups versus efficiency. We find that owner fixed effects contribute very little to the performance of brands. On average, foreign ownership tends to raise costs and lower appeal. Using the estimated model, we simulate the consequences of counterfactual national merger regulation. The US beer price index would have been 4-7% higher without divestitures. Up to 30% savings could have been obtained in Latin America by emulating the pro-competition policies of the US and EU.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, and Multinational Corporations
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Latin America, and Global Focus

15. Corporate tax avoidance and industry concentration

Author:
Farid Toubal, Mathieu Parenti, and Julien Martin
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII)
Abstract:
This paper argues that tax avoidance by large corporations has contributed to the 25% increase in concentration among U.S. firms since the mid-1990s. Corporate tax avoidance gives large firms a competitive edge, which translates into larger market shares and an increase in the granularity of the economy. We develop IV and difference-in-differences strategies that show the causal impact of tax avoidance on firm-level sales. Had firms not resorted to tax avoidance in 2017, our results imply that the average industry concentration would have been 8.3% lower, which is around its early 2000 level.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, Markets, Tax Systems, Corporations, Tax Evasion, and Corporate Tax
Political Geography:
United States and Global Focus

16. How Market Sentiment Drives Forecasts of Stock Returns

Author:
Roman Frydman, Nicholas Mangee, and Josh Stillwagon
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
We reveal a novel channel through which market participants’ sentiment influences how they forecast stock returns: their optimism (pessimism) affects the weights they assign to fundamentals. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, if good (bad) “news” about dividends and interest rates coincides with participants’ optimism (pessimism), the news about these fundamentals has a significant effect on participants’ forecasts of future returns and has the expected signs (positive for dividends and negative for interest rates). Second, in models without interactions, or when market sentiment is neutral or conflicts with news about dividends and/or interest rates, this news often does not have a significant effect on ex ante or ex post returns. Third, market sentiment is largely unrelated to the state of economic activity, indicating that it is driven by non-fundamental considerations. Moreover, market sentiment influences stock returns highly irregularly, in terms of both timing and magnitude. This finding supports recent theoretical approaches recognizing that economists and market participants alike face Knightian uncertainty about the correct model driving stock returns.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, and Stock Markets
Political Geography:
United States

17. Money, Cattle Hides and William A Leidesdorff: California before the Gold Rush

Author:
Jonathan Tiemann, Oenone Kubie, and Christopher McKenna
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Oxford Centre for Global History
Abstract:
The discovery of gold in January 1848, at Nueva Helvetia, John Sutter’s property in the Sacramento Valley, changed the course of Californian history. By the end of March, San Francisco had emptied as its population swarmed to the gold fields that had opened up around Sutter’s lumbermills and by August, the East Coast newspapers were reporting the discovery of Californian gold. In December of that year, President James K Polk confirmed the find in front of Congress and in 1849, one of America’s largest migrations ever took place as hundreds of thousands of gold prospectors, the ‘Forty-niners’, descended on ‘Gold Country’.
Topic:
Agriculture, Economics, History, Natural Resources, Capitalism, Economic Development, Cattle, and Farming
Political Geography:
United States

18. Is the Most Unproductive Firm the Foundation of the Most Efficient Economy? Penrosian Learning Confronts the Neoclassical Fallacy

Author:
William Lazonick
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Edith Penrose’s 1959 book The Theory of the Growth of the Firm [TGF] provides intellectual foundations for a theory of innovative enterprise, which is essential to any attempt to explain productivity growth, employment opportunity, and income distribution. Properly understood, Penrose’s theory of the firm is also an antidote to the deception that is foundational to neoclassical economics: The theory, taught by PhD economists to millions upon millions of college students for over seven decades, that the most unproductive firm is the foundation of the most efficient economy. The dissemination of this “neoclassical fallacy” to a mass audience of college students began with Paul A. Samuelson’s textbook, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948. Over the decades, the neoclassical fallacy has persisted through 18 revisions of Samuelson, Economics and in its countless “economics principles” clones. This essay challenges the intellectual hegemony of neoclassical economics by exposing the illogic of its foundational assumptions about how a modern economy functions and performs. The neoclassical fallacy gained popularity in the 1950s, during which decade Samuelson revised Economics three times. Meanwhile, Penrose derived the logic of organizational learning that she lays out in TGF from the facts of firm growth, absorbing what was known in the 1950s about the large corporations that had come to dominate the U.S. economy. Also, during that decade, the knowledge base on the growth of firms on which economists could subsequently draw was undergoing an intellectual revolution, led by the business historian, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. He was engaged in the first stage of a career that would span more than a half century, during which Chandler documented and analyzed the centrality to U.S economic development of what he would come to call “the managerial revolution in American business.” In combination, the works of Penrose and Chandler form intellectual foundations for my own work on the Theory of Innovative Enterprise—an endeavor that has enabled me, as an economist, to recognize not only the profound importance of organizational learning for economic theory but also the illogic of the neoclassical theory of the firm for our understanding of the central institution of a modern economy, the business corporation. In this essay, I argue that the key characteristic of the innovative enterprise is fixed-cost investment in the productive capabilities of the company’s employees to engage in organizational learning. The purpose of this investment in organizational learning is to develop a higher-quality product than was previously available. When successful, the development of the higher-quality product enables the firm to capture a large extent of the market, transforming high fixed cost into low unit cost. The result is sustainable competitive advantage that enables the growth of the firm, contributing to the growth of the economy as a whole. I argue that to get beyond the neoclassical fallacy, economists have to stop relying on constrained-optimization methodology. Rather, they need to be trained in a “historical transformation” methodology that integrates history and theory. It is a methodology in which theory serves as both a distillation of what we have learned from the study of history and a guide to what we need to learn about reality as the “present as history” unfolds.
Topic:
Economics, Political Economy, Macroeconomics, and Neoclassical Economics
Political Geography:
United States

19. Payment vs. Funding: The Law of Reflux for Today

Author:
Perry Mehrling
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
The analytical tension in post-Keynesian thought between the theory of endogenous (credit) money and the theory of liquidity preference, brought to our attention by Dow and Dow (1989), can be viewed through the lens of the money view (Mehrling 2013) as a particular case of the balance between the elasticity of payment and the discipline of funding. Further, updating Fullarton’s 1844 “law of reflux” for the modern condition of financial globalization and market- based credit, the same money view lens offers a critical entry point into Tobin’s fateful 1963 intervention “Commercial Banks as Creators of ‘Money’” which established post-war orthodoxy, and also to the challenge offered by so-called Modern Money Theory.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, Monetary Policy, Economic Theory, Macroeconomics, Keynes, and Credit
Political Geography:
United States

20. Private Equity Buyouts in Healthcare: Who Wins, Who Loses?

Author:
Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Private equity firms have become major players in the healthcare industry. How has this happened and what are the results? What is private equity’s ‘value proposition’ to the industry and to the American people -- at a time when healthcare is under constant pressure to cut costs and prices? How can PE firms use their classic leveraged buyout model to ‘save healthcare’ while delivering ‘outsized returns’ to investors? In this paper, we bring together a wide range of sources and empirical evidence to answer these questions. Given the complexity of the sector, we focus on four segments where private equity firms have been particularly active: hospitals, outpatient care (urgent care and ambulatory surgery centers), physician staffing and emergency room services (surprise medical billing), and revenue cycle management (medical debt collecting). In each of these segments, private equity has taken the lead in consolidating small providers, loading them with debt, and rolling them up into large powerhouses with substantial market power before exiting with handsome returns.
Topic:
Economics, Privatization, Health Care Policy, Health Insurance, and Private Equity
Political Geography:
United States