Implicit marginal tax rates in new health insurance coverage

Greg Mankiw points out high implicit marginal tax rates associated with health insurance reform as currently proposed. Insurance subsidies for low-income families phase out with income, meaning that as income rises, it is taxed away either implicitly through a reduction in health insurance subsidies or explicitly through payroll and income taxes.

The income levels he cites are not low: $54,000 for a family of four. The Earned Income Tax Credit also has a phaseout, but at a somewhat lower level of income, something like $35K - $40K or so.

Brooks on the mating market

David Brooks writes about the New York Mag sex diaries, technology, and behavioral reactions of young singles today to the lack of courtship structure. Things like texting a "backup" when on a date with somebody else. My favorite quote: "Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners."

I wonder what Gary Becker would have to say about this. Economists typically believe more information is better, but then you toss in the part about atrophying social mores and constraints, and it's not clear what the result is.

Roundtable on stimulus effects

Here's another article containing several perspectives on whether the fiscal stimulus plan is functioning. To elaborate on one of Simon Johnson's points, the U.S. has automatic fiscal stabilizers in place --- taxes fall with the economy, and some spending rises --- but typically only at the federal rather than state and local level. I wonder how much bang-for-the-buck from stimulus spending has come from "saving" educational jobs and spending programs. It would seem that's one of the most vulnerable elements during downturns, given states' balanced budget amendments.

Many are talking about the tenuousness of consumer demand, given that Cash for Clunkers appears to have shifted demand in addition possibly to increasing it above what it would have been. This is based on Friday's personal income release.

Lazear on stimulus accounting

CEA alum Ed Lazear points out the problems with the government's "jobs created" measure derived from the survey of funds recipients, available on www.recovery.gov. First, it's self-reported. But we also measure unemployment using self-reports, from individual workers in the Current Population Survey.

A second point is that the self-reported measure is a gross rather than net measure. If a job was "created" by poaching an employee from another firm or agency, the net effect is zero even when its gross effect, as would be reported by the poaching agency, is positive.

Lazear also cites the lagging nature of employment, which is certainly true. But he doesn't present a solution to the difficult problem of trying to assess the marginal effects of the stimulus package, a task that requires a counterfactual. Wouldn't it be nice if we'd had two economies rather than one, and to compare one with the stimulus to one without? Pre-stimulus forecasts are not a valid baseline because they are of poor quality. (Nobody knows how to forecast the length of a recession, let alone an impending one.)

Menand on Ph.D "guilds"

Harvard professor and New Yorker contributor Louis Menand has a new book out in January, The Marketplace of Ideas, in which he examines the U.S. university system. A very interesting, if unfortunately a little scattershot, series of excerpts appeared in the November Harvard Magazine.

On thing I think Menand totally missed, at least in the excerpt and perhaps not in the book itself, is the question about Ph.D training and professorial jobs on the one hand, and women, childbearing, and family work/life balance on the other. He writes about the rise in competition for academic jobs due to overproduction of Ph.D's, and about the rise in median time-to-degree. But he doesn't discuss the interplay with the life cycle especially as regards family formation.

One could make an argument that a lengthy time-to-degree setup is actually preferable for some scholars who wish to have children during training. The alternatives would be either not getting a degree, not having children, having them before the degree, or having them afterward, possibly during the stresses of a tenure-track position. I don't mean to suggest that this argument must be correct, but it deserves some thought.

Fairly late in the excerpts, Menand acknowledges that graduate students are an important part of the academic labor force. If tenure is important for preserving academic freedom, labor with relatively more flexibility is surely an even more attractive element.

And as a posted comment at the bottom of the excerpt points out, the physical sciences are really very different than the humanities and social sciences in their industrial structure. Postdocs in physical science are extremely common; I think median time-to-degree is thus a bit misleading when compared between physical and social sciences, for example. Lab work and dissertations that flow from a directed lab are also very common. And grad students in physical sciences not only teach, they also produce research, sort of a "double-whammy" incentivizing the professoriate toward keeping them around practically as indentured servants.

"Grandma plays favorites"

Molly Fox and a group of coauthors recently published a paper on grandmothers and child survival that shows improved survivorship among children with more of the grandmother's genetic material. The idea then is that grandmothers with "longevity genes" (not "grandma jeans") pass along their habit of being long-lived to their (paternal, it turns out) granddaughters. Hence a yet-clearer evolutionary argument for long life past menopause.

The authors examine girls' and boys' mortality based on the presence of maternal or paternal grandmothers, and they pose the idea that differences in the inheritability of the X chromosome across sexes of grandkids and paternal/maternal sides ought to be interesting. At the top of this post is their neat Figure 1 that traces the heritability of genes.

They find higher mortality among boys with a paternal grandmother present compared to those with a maternal grandmother present, and that the presence of a paternal grandmother was statistically significantly better for girls than boys.

I was shocked that they had data that could inform this. I also wondered whether there are omitted variables. Is it just random whether a paternal or maternal grandmother is present, or whether one is present at all? Or is it connected to low SES or poor health somehow?

High demand for community colleges

The six community colleges in CUNY are said to have experienced a 9 percent increase in enrollments according to this Times article. The article also profiles a community college in Boston that offers a class starting at 11:45pm and ending at 2:30am. And here I thought a 5-8pm class was rough!