January 8, 2025
Menu Adjustment in Response to the Minimum Wage: A Return to the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Border
Abstract This paper studies how output prices are affected by increases in the minimum wage. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first examination of how the prices of an entire menu of items at a single business adjust in response to a minimum wage increase. Using data we gather from a fast-food…
January 7, 2025
Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family
During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax credit (CTC). Attempts to expand the credit to make it easier for two-parent families to have kids and rely on a sole breadwinner were thwarted by objections that a child allowance would also promote single-parent families in which no one…
January 7, 2025
More Skilled Immigrants for More Economic Growth
The recent appointment of venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, an Elon Musk ally, to the incoming Trump administration sparked controversy on X (formerly Twitter) among MAGA supporters. The conflict arose from Krishnan’s past support for removing green card country caps for skilled immigrants, a position aligned with Silicon Valley but controversial among some Trump supporters. Amid this debate,…
December 29, 2024
Why Rent Regulation Remains So Hard to Undo in NYC
Few would argue that New York City is mired in a housing crisis — as defined by high prices and low vacancies. There’s good evidence for that conclusion. The most recent federal New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey reported a vacancy rate of just 1.4%, “a stark contrast to the 4.54 rate in 2021”. Over the same period,…
December 20, 2024
Fixing Inflation, Right-Sizing the Federal Government
Thirty years ago next month, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before a joint session of the House and Senate Budget Committees with talk of deficit reduction in the air. In January 1995, Republicans had just won control of both houses for the first time in 42 years. The federal debt had reached 48…
December 17, 2024
Industrial Policy and Deficits: Dark Clouds for Democratic Capitalism
Democratic capitalism is a system that marries liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. This union creates tensions, and requires balancing competing aims. But this tension is healthy, not destructive — provided that democracy and capitalism are properly balanced, each sphere reinforces the other. Over the long term, capitalism requires liberal politics; and democracy will not maintain…
December 12, 2024
Senate Special Committee on Aging Hearing on Empowering People with Disabilities to Live, Work, Learn, and Thrive
Introduction: Chairman Casey, Ranking Member Braun and members of the committee, thank you for theopportunity to testify on the critical issues facing aging and disabled members of the Americanworkforce. I’d like to frame my remarks on this topic in two different but interrelated dimensionsof concern: the practical demands of the American economy and the moral…
December 5, 2024
More High-Skill Immigration Is Popular. Let’s Act on That
This might be one of the most underappreciated facts of American public opinion: As controversial as the subject of immigration is, high-skill immigration isn’t controversial at all. A Pew Research Center poll in September found 71 percent of Donald Trump supporters and 87 percent of Kamala Harris supporters favored admitting more high-skilled immigrants. Likewise, a survey last summer from…
December 5, 2024
Inflation Reduction Act Offers a General Lesson against Industrial Policy
With President Trump’s stunning return to power, Congress has the opportunity in 2025 to enact additional business tax cuts. One of their specific goals should be to make “full expensing” of business investment a permanent part of the tax code. By allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of investment in the year the spending…
December 2, 2024
Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
Abstract We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological progress inherently impossible in construction. What stopped it? We present…