Sat, 22 December 2018
Today on the podcast, Ash Navabi returns to discuss his recent work on housing and rent control. Ash published an opinion piece entitled "Why low-income earners should actually welcome Ontario's reversal on rent control." In that article, Ash pushes back on the kneejerk reaction to the Ontario government's reversal of its rent control policy on new units: There's no question that there are problems with affordability and livability in certain areas of Ontario, but implementing rigid rent control measures is not the way to fix them. We discuss the policy change that prompted the article, and the backlash the article itself generated, as well as many things related to housing policy. |
Fri, 14 December 2018
Today's guest is Jonathan Meer of Texas A&M. We discuss his work on the minimum wage. The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. For both theoretical and econometric reasons, we argue that the effect of the minimum wage should be more apparent in new employment growth than in employment levels. In addition, we conduct a simulation showing that the common practice of including state-specific time trends will attenuate the measured effects of the minimum wage on employment if the true effect is in fact on the rate of job growth. Using three separate state panels of administrative employment data, we find that the minimum wage reduces net job growth, primarily through its effect on job creation by expanding establishments. These effects are most pronounced for younger workers and in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage workers.
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Fri, 7 December 2018
Today's guest is Bryan Cutsinger of George Mason University, discussing his paper, "Seigniorage in the Civil War South." During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage - revenue that the government derived by using the newly-printed Treasury notes to purchase the goods and services it required. We argue that the bifurcation of the Confederate Congress into two groups – those legislators that represented the Confederacy's interior and those from areas no longer under Confederate control – contributed to the adoption of the reforms. Our findings indicate that representing an area outside of the rebel government's control increased the likelihood that a legislator would support efforts to reform the currency by over 90 percent. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of monetary expansion in the South was below that which would have maximized the revenue from seigniorage. We find that the reforms reduced the flow of seigniorage by approximately 57 percent, depriving the Confederate government of much-needed revenue.
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