background preloader

Greg Mankiw's Blog

Greg Mankiw's Blog
Over the past few decades, there has been an amazing shift in how businesses are taxed. See the figure below, which is from CBO. Businesses are more and more taxed as pass-through entities, where the income shows up on personal tax returns rather than on corporate returns. (Here is an article discussing how the mutual giant Fidelity recently switched from one form to the other.) This phenomenon complicates the interpretation of tax return data. For example, when one looks at the growth of the 1 percent, or the 0.1 percent, in the Piketty-Saez data, that growth is likely exaggerated because some income is merely being shifted from corporate returns.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/

Reading Politics · Intervention and Prudence Patrick Porter Finally after a busy teaching term I’ve got a chance to add some thoughts to the great post and articles by Jon Western and Joshua Goldstein on humanitarian intervention. Bottom line: I think Jon and Joshua make a robust case that not only can intervention work, but that the international community is learning effectively how to go about it. As they argue, it is a technique of statecraft that is being refined and better understood. Street Sweep - Fortune Finance: Hedge Funds, Markets, Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Equity, Venture Capital, Wall Street, Washington Apparently Bernie Madoff wasn't the only bad apple at Nasdaq. In the latest shining moment for the U.S. stock exchanges, the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday charged Donald Johnson, a former Nasdaq managing director, with ripping off investors to the tune of $755,000 by insider trading ahead of the release of corporate press releases. Johnson, you will be impressed to learn, was in charge through October 2009 of the Nasdaq's "market intelligence" desk, which is surely a misnomer but seems in any case to have afforded him with a lot of info he used to trade profitably on outfits like United Therapeutics (UTHR). Fearless leader The SEC has come under heavy fire in recent years for its failure to nab Madoff, a three-term Nasdaq chairman in the 1990s, before he frittered away $20 billion in the biggest-ever Ponzi scheme.

Blog Roundtable: Are there tips for fighting impostor syndrome? « Mr Epidemiology This blog roundtable is part of a series about graduate school – why do it, what is it like, and what to do afterwards. I encourage you to give your own opinions in the comments section, and if you disagree with a point made by the panel, voice your opinion! This is something a lot of my readers can relate to, so I’m hoping to hear from all of you. Note that these are the opinions of those involved, and do not reflect our institutions or departments in any way. For a full list of the questions, read the first post. One of those is not the mouse you are looking for (click to go to Snorgtees.com)

Marginal Revolution Going as far back as Andrew Weiss’s survey paper , there are various attempts to argue that the two theories make the same predictions about earnings and education. A randomly elevated individual will earn more money but is this from having learned more or from being pooled with a more productive set of peers? To explore this, let’s pursue the very good question asked by Bryan Caplan : Our story begins with a 22-year-old high school graduate with a B average. He knows an unscrupulous nerd who can hack into Harvard’s central computer and give him a fake diploma, complete with transcript.

the intervention ratchet’s lexicon: confronting the teleology of mass atrocities prevention « Securing Rights This is the second post in a series on the lexicon of intervention’s slippery slope. The series is intended to educate human rights advocates about the opportunities, costs, and opportunity costs of coercive responses to mass atrocities. Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich, and Bridget Conley-Zilkic, three genocide scholars, have penned an exceptional essay on the analytical shortcomings of the present discourse on mass atrocities prevention. Disaggregating historical models of atrocities termination, de Waal, Meierhenrich, and Conley-Zilkic complicate popular trends in atrocities scholarship. The authors outline three dominant characteristics of the “genocide and mass atrocities” narrative: the teleological sliding scale of genocide’s emergence, the epistemological assumption of military intervention’s effectiveness, and the subsequent ethical imperative underlying our cognitive perceptions of mass atrocities. The essay is worth reading in full.

Amazing Places To Experience Around The Globe (Part 1) 98 Flares Facebook 13 Twitter 15 Google+ 60 StumbleUpon 0 Pin It Share 10 10 98 Flares × Kayangan Lake, Coron islands, Palawan, Philippines Preachers Rock, Preikestolen, Norway Blue Caves – Zakynthos Island, Greece Skaftafeli – Iceland 521 - Cartography’s Favourite Map Monster: the Land Octopus by Frank Jacobs Over the centuries, the high seas have served as a blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deathly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more - a whole panoply of heraldic horrors. As varied as this marine bestiary is, mapmakers have settled on a single, favourite species for land-based beastliness: the octopus. Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus - CLO for short - need not worry about being in the right ecosphere.

Magazine - Table of Contents The Thirteenth Amendment forbade slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Crops stretch to the horizon. Black bodies pepper the landscape, hunched over as they work the fields. Officers on horseback, armed, oversee the workers. Censoring on one end, "outliers" on the other, what can we do with the middle? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science This post was written by Phil. A medical company is testing a cancer drug. They get a 16 genetically identical (or nearly identical) rats that all have the same kind of tumor, give 8 of them the drug and leave 8 untreated…or maybe they give them a placebo, I don’t know; is there a placebo effect in rats?. Anyway, after a while the rats are killed and examined. If the tumors in the treated rats are smaller than the tumors in the untreated rats, then all of the rats have their blood tested for dozens of different proteins that are known to be associated with tumor growth or suppression.

MITx Opens for Enrollment (and Certification - For Now - Is Free) MIT opens registration today for the first of its online courses offered as part of its new MITx initiative. The university announced MITx late last year as the next step not just in informal online learning but in alternative certification. Registration for MITx is free and open to anyone, and for this first "prototype" class, there is no additional charge to receive the certification upon successful completion of the class.

Related: