Hoynes on EITC

Today at Berkeley, Hilary Hoynes spoke about the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on female labor supply. She and a coauthor find increases in working of about 6 percentage points among single mothers after the EITC expansion of the early 1990s, compared to single women without kids. Moms with more kids and thus more tax credits also worked (even) more.

This is a bread-and-butter labor supply issue, great for applied teaching. To paraphrase her words, the substitution effect dominates, and moms who see higher after-tax wages because of the EITC substitute away from leisure and toward working even though their incomes also rose.

PTSD as moral exile

David Brooks summarizes this view today. With self-reported exposure to combat near an all-time high among the current cohort of war veterans, understanding how PTSD works is vital. The shocking thing is that the WWII cohort reported similarly high rates of exposure, but it was only after Vietnam that medicine started taking a modern approach toward PTSD.

In praise of immigrants and rails

In today's NY Times, an ode to a Galway great-grandfather, the transcontinental railroad, and Leland Stanford, Sr.  Capital infrastructure projects require workers, and it's hard not to notice the traffic congestion now in the Golden State.  Standard caveats apply; LAX and SFO also employ people.